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CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY 



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CREATIVE 
CHRISTIANITY 

A STUDY OF THE GENIUS 
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 



BY 

GEORGE CROSS 



Jfaui f ark 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1922 

All rights reserved 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



I*' 



6 V 



Copyright, 1922 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and printed. Published February, 1922. 



FERRIS 

PRINTING COMPANY 
NEW YORK CITY 



FEB 15 1922 
©CI.A654649 



TO MY CHILDREN 



FOREWORD 

DURING Easter Week of this year it was my 
privilege to deliver the Nathaniel W. Taylor 
Lectures at the Convocation of the Divinity 
School of Yale University. I wish hereby to express 
my thanks to the authorities of the University for the 
opportunity of setting forth some of my personal 
views before audiences of an extraordinary character 
and to my hearers for the patient and sympathetic 
manner in which they listened to my words. The 
lectures are here offered to the reading public in 
the form in which they were originally delivered, 
except for a slight expansion at a few points. The 
temptation to extend considerably the discussion of 
some of the subjects mentioned was very great, but 
such a course would have necessitated the recasting 
of the entire work and the substitution of an 
elaborate exposition of the theme for the merely 
suggestive treatment that is more natural in the 
case of lectures. Perchance I may be able at some 
future time to offer a more exhaustive discussion 
of important topics only touched upon at this time. 
It is proper, perhaps, that this foreword should 
mention some reasons for the designation of my 
theme : "Creative Christianity." While it is hoped 
that the lectures themselves make these plain, it may 
7 



8 Foreword 

be added here that the title was chosen because of 
the fitness of the descriptive term creative to set 
forth a distinguishing quality of the faith which 
Jesus Christ has given to the world. From its 
beginnings this faith has had its home in the hearts 
of the common people, its power in any land or 
age in which it has made a place for itself has al- 
ways been in direct proportion to the strength of 
its hold on the people whose hands are hard with 
toil and whose minds are full of care, and the 
most effective means of its dissemination have always 
been found in the natural associations of the people 
with one another. That it should be the faith of 
the most intelligent, independent and enterprising 
nations of the world in our day is what one might 
expect when he discerns its genius. For it tends 
invariably to freedom and spontaneity of action and 
expression wherever it is found. Its progress among 
any people is marked by the lessening of external 
direction and control and the growth of inner confi- 
dence and self -affirmation. Not fixity of form but 
continuity of development mark its presence and tell 
its secret. Like a tree of life it has the self -perpetuat- 
ing power of an inner vital principle and from time 
to time it sheds its temporary forms, as a tree sheds 
its leaves, to provide for its own larger self-unfold- 
ing. 

Christianity is a historical faith. This is much 
more than to say that it is united both in its origin 
and its continuance to definite concrete fact rather 



Foreword 9 

than mere speculation, much more than to say that 
it persists through successive periods of time by 
means of the actual tangible forces that come into 
action in the life of humanity. It is also to say 
that its course is not truly separable from the action 
of the complex of forces that make up the career 
of any people who receive it, but it lives in their life. 
The story of Christianity is just the life-story of the 
people who are Christians. It is not a something in 
itself that may be attached to the personal life from 
without and, at will, detached again. It is in course 
of change constantly just as the life of humanity 
is always changing. The Christianity of today in 
any land is more than the Christianity of yesterday, 
just as the civil and social life of any people is 
more than it was yesterday. 

The organizing genius of the Christian faith mani- 
fests itself in the reshaping of the forms of conduct 
or morality, the political affairs or civil constitution, 
the traditional theories of life or popular philosophy, 
and the manifestation of the spirit of reverence or 
worship current among any people. The faith be- 
comes institutionalized in this way. It also becomes 
institutionalized in the churches which seek to be a 
direct embodiment of the Christian faith. These 
have their own forms of government, doctrine and 
worship, which commonly come to be viewed as 
essential to the faith itself. But there comes a time 
when these regulative provisions operate in the direc- 
tion of restraining the freedom and initiative of the 



10 Foreword 

believers whose spiritual good was intended origin- 
ally to be served by them. As a progressive people 
outgrows these "essential" forms their continued 
imposition becomes a tyranny or oppression that 
must be resisted and thrown off, if faith is still to 
continue. That which seemed at one time indis- 
pensable to the religious life of the people has to be 
set aside in the interest of that very life, and other 
forms more truly representative of their higher faith 
and more adequate to the fulfillment of its aims must 
take their place. This is, in substance, what occurred 
in the Protestant Reformation when national 
churches took the place of the imperial Roman 
Church, and again when the free churches arose in 
response to the larger life that came to many of 
those who had had their spiritual home in the na- 
tional churches. In the creativity of the Christian 
faith lies its power to avert the danger of stagnation 
and death. 

It is not to be successfully disputed that we are 
at the present day in the midst of a powerful move- 
ment, nurtured by a variety of spiritual tendencies 
current among intelligent people, looking to the re- 
making of the forms in which our Protestantism has 
traditionally expressed its inner life. Ecclesiastical 
and doctrinal reconstruction are particularly impera- 
tive if the multitudes of educated young people issu- 
ing from our schools and colleges are to find a 
congenial home in our Christian churches. Owing 
to the character of the training to which they have 



Foreword 1 1 

been subject all the way from the kindergarten to 
the university graduate school, the native cast of 
mind in which their religious life is to receive its 
moulding is so vastly different from that in which 
we and our fathers approached religious questions 
that, cost what it may to our feelings, we must 
make up our mind that their interpretation of the 
Christian faith, as of life in general, will be very 
different from that which was given to us by the 
fathers. The possibility of winning and holding 
these young people for the Christian faith depends 
very much on the frankness and courage with which 
those of us who are familiar and sympathetic with 
their training and perceive clearly the character of 
the questions they must face shortly, make up our 
minds to tell the whole truth, as we see it, plainly and 
kindly, leaving the outcome to the God of truth. 
For, be it remembered, these young people are to 
be the guides of the great masses of humanity in 
many lands in the days that are now coming so 
swiftly upon us, when all the peoples of the earth 
will mingle and seek a common leadership. 

Two of the principal impediments to this higher 
and purer faith I must mention. One of these is 
the ancient Catholic inheritance of sacramentalism 
and the other is the early Protestant inheritance of 
legalism. These are often associated. Both tend 
to obscure the inwardness, directness and freedom 
of the soul's communion with its God and both pro- 
duce the fruit of a morally sterile formalism and a 



1 2 Foreword 

bitter intolerance. Both must be firmly repudiated 
in the interest of a pure and puissant faith that is 
to be the faith of mankind. 

Happy are those teachers of youth who see in 
the enquiring minds of the boys and girls who 
throng our places of learning the promise of a 
Christian faith higher than that which our fathers 
gave to us and destined to succeed in winning the 
allegiance of multitudes whom our faith failed to 
win! Tennyson's words in "Locksley Hall'' here 
come to mind : 

"Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, for- 
ward let us range, 

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing 
grooves of change. 

Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the 
younger day; 

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. 

Mother-Age (for mine I knew not) help me as 
when life begun; 

Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the light- 
nings, weigh the sun — 

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not 
set, 

Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy 
yet." 

George Cross. 

Rochester, New York, 
June 21, 1921. 



CONTENTS 
Chapter I. 

PAGE 

The Method of the Study 17 

Chapter II. 

The Discovery of the Perfect Personality. ... 54 

Chapter III. 
The Making of the Better World 94 

Chapter IV. 
The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 130 



CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY 



CREATIVE CHRISTIANITY; 

A Study of the Genius of the Christian Faith. 
CHAPTER I. 

LECTURE I. THE METHOD OF THE STUDY. 

Brethren of the Christian Ministry and Friends : 

IN the series of addresses which it is to be my 
privilege to bring to you this Easter Week I 
am to ask you to embark with me on a study 
of the genius of the Christian faith. To everyone 
who seeks to hold this faith intelligently and to 
communicate it to the minds and consciences of 
others this task of ours must present itself as per- 
manently imperative, and the present juncture in 
human affairs makes the time particularly opportune. 
For the work of reconstituting the essential order 
of human life, now pressing so hard on the human 
power of initiative on a vast scale among many 
peoples, is bound to produce a profound effect on 
the religious life of men every where and particularly 
where their religion has such ecumenical relations 
as ours. Some of the most noteworthy influences 
at work in this direction may be indicated at the 
outset. 

17 



18 Creative Christianity 

The great war which broke in upon the peace 
of mankind less than seven years ago seems to 
have precipitated upon the world a cataclysm of 
unparalleled magnitude. It was not alone the deso- 
lation of the lands where the war was waged or 
the destruction of the accumulated wealth of the 
peoples, not alone the hugeness of the forces en- 
gaged in battle or even the wastage of human life — 
appalling though it was — that made the cataclysm 
so terrible to think upon. Nor was it that thrones 
crumbled, governments and empires were crushed 
or rent in sunder; that economic systems were 
thrown into confusion and social bonds were dis- 
rupted; that customs and maxims that had long 
stood sentinel to guard humanity against the power 
of unrestrained passion lost their authority — though 
the extent to which this occurred has filled our 
minds at times with bewilderment and our hearts 
with foreboding. 

More trying than all this can be to the souls 
of men is the disillusionment of the hopes of the 
millions of people who have borne the Christian 
name. Prior to the war the old pessimistic spirit 
that formerly prevailed among Christians when 
they looked worldward had mostly passed away 
and the spirit of optimism had came at last to 
prevail. The rapid spread of the Christian Gospel 
during the last hundred years, the forming of 
Christian communities in every land, the constituent 
relation which the Christian religion had come to 



The Method of Study 19 

hold toward all the great forces of modern civiliza- 
tion, the penetration of literature and education, 
science and art with its avowed principles, the insti- 
tution by Christians of enterprises for the ameliora- 
tion of human conditions everywhere — all these 
were allied in inspiring men with the vision of the 
rapid coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth. 
Our eyes were mostly closed to the signs of ap- 
proaching strife and our ears to the subterranean 
rumblings that told of preparations for war and 
we could not believe that, even if the spirit of the 
beast and the bandit should arouse itself again, it 
would prove mighty enough to bring our noble 
structure down in ruins, until the breakdown sud- 
denly came. 

One of the sights that were peculiarly distressing 
to true-hearted and simple-minded believers was 
the spectacle of nations professedly Christian rang- 
ing themselves on opposite sides in the conflict. 
Christian and non-Christian were thrown confusedly 
together, so that the struggle had not the appearance 
of a war of religions. Moreover, the outbreak of 
savagery in many quarters and the ill-success in 
coping with it seemed to indicate that the motives 
which we commonly associate with the Christian 
name had a far lighter hold on the hearts of men 
than the prevalence of Christian forms and organiza- 
tions seemed to indicate. Consequently, many intelli- 
gent people have been found in all seriousness ask- 
ing the question, Has Christianity failed? 



20 Creative Christianity 

It will not do to take this question lightly or 
minimize the difficulty of answering it. We may not 
regard it as a mere reaction consequent upon an 
unusual strain. Nor will it do to seek to evade 
the issue by replying, "Christianity has not been 
tried," and seek to back up the evasion by quoting 
some single utterance of scripture that sets forth a 
principle of the Christian life which no man abso- 
lutely fulfills. If Christianity has a history — as 
it assuredly has — then it is certain that Christianity 
has been tried these nearly nineteen hundred years. 
It must be frankly confessed that the Christianity 
of the most recent past did fail at the very point 
at which multitudes of us had hoped its power 
would prevail, that is, it failed to prevent the most 
hideous war in history. We do not forget the 
magnificent display of heroism and self-sacrifice 
by which the life — and death — of multitudes of those 
on whose shoulders the responsibility of rescuing 
humanity from an unspeakable calamity was glori- 
fied. And yet, notwithstanding it all, it is pretty 
evident that people generally do not feel as sure as 
once they felt that the Christian religion has brought 
human control over material forces sufficiently under 
the power of moral force to assure us that material- 
ism is not now threatening to crush the power of 
the higher life. 

It may be that other people will seek relief from 
the pressure of the question by reviving a conception 
of Christianity that, we supposed, Protestantism 



The Method of Study 21 

had outlived. It will be claimed, perchance, that 
the association or alliance of Christianity with com- 
munity action, especially of a secular kind, is un- 
natural and unnecessary, that it was never intended 
to become integral to civilization because its home 
and its aims are found in another world, the world 
above. "It has not failed," they will say, "because 
it has brought to all who receive it an assurance of 
attaining to that home. Its original intent is being 
constantly fulfilled." Undoubtedly much scripture 
can be quoted as looking in that direction. We shall 
take further cognizance of this contention at a later 
stage of our study. 

Others, again, somewhat likeminded with these, 
will seek to turn aside any implication of Christian 
failure by narrowing the issue to a single point. 
Such a saying as "Blessed are the pure in heart, 
for they shall see God," may be quoted to remind 
us that no man who has met the condition here laid 
down for happiness will say that Christianity has 
failed to bring him the joy and strength he sought. 
Such words as these are doubtless of great signifi- 
cance and we thankfully acknowledge the comfort- 
ing asurance that the Christian Gospel, as expressed 
in these words, has not failed to bring consolation 
and strength to multitudes whose minds have been 
profoundly exercised over international questions 
or other ecumenical problems. But, at the same time, 
it must be plain that to one who has taken the world 
of humanity into his heart and who views the strug- 



22 Creative Christianity 

gles of great communities of men with one another 
and the upheavals that disrupt the ancient bonds 
of society as significant of the effort of the spirit 
that is at work in our race to bring the world to 
a better state, the question keeps coming home, " Why 
has not Christianity made this purity of heart a more 
common possession and a greater force in the 
world?" It seems to me pretty plain that all such 
must feel that the prevailing conditions at the present 
time call for a reconsideration of the whole aim and 
effective power of the Christian faith. 

In addition to the facts I have mentioned there are 
many concurrent influences now bidding us recon- 
sider the meaning of our Christian traditions. Some 
of these influences are not very familiar to the mul- 
titudes whose hands are too busy with toil or whose 
minds are too much occupied with the simple issues 
of everyday affairs to make it possible for them to 
become acquainted with the ways of the schools or 
the interests that affect most deeply the mind of the 
professional student. And yet the problems of the 
trained thinker have a way of percolating through 
to the thoughts of the more serious-minded among 
the toiling masses of men. These discover that the 
problems of the thinker are truly their problems too. 
So that, for their sake also, even apart from the is- 
sues raised by the war, a revision of the whole 
inherited exposition of the Christian faith is becom- 
ing daily a more pressing necessity. And this, I am 
sure, we shall see, is not to be regretted as if it were 



The Method of Study 23 

a mark of declining faith. It is rather, I trust, an 
indication that our faith is coming to have for us a 
more vital relation to the whole of life than it had for 
our fathers, It is not necessary in this place to do 
more than make a bare mention of the principal con- 
current influences I have in mind. 

Firstly, then, there are the accepted methods and 
results of modern scientific research. The persistent 
interrogation of nature, the collating and organizing 
of her answers, the inductions and inferences drawn 
therefrom, with a seemingly pitiless disregard of the 
personal longings of the investigator or of any one 
else, have annulled the ancient Christian representa- 
tions of this world, the worlds above and the worlds 
below, so that they have ceased to appear as a state- 
ment of discovered or revealed facts, and have be- 
come to us a series of merely symbolic representations 
of the movements of the inner spirit. This has 
forced an abandonment of the cosmography which 
is so closely interwoven with the biblical and long 
current Christian view of the relation which the 
world in which we now live bears to another world 
to which men go when they die that, to many persons, 
it seems difficult, if not impossible, to replace the 
ancient view with the modern except at the cost of 
undermining popular confidence in the truth of the 
faith that found at one time this ancient cosmography 
so congenial. Let us remember that the common 
school children are being trained in the new 
mode of conceiving the world and that they will 



24 Creative Christianity 

carry it with them through every phase of their 
lives. 

Secondly, there is the fundamental scientific and 
philosophic contention that that there can be no 
genuine knowledge of this universe in which we 
must live our life, except on the presupposition of 
the immanency, permanency and integrated unity of 
the forces and laws of the universe. This is now 
becoming a common maxim of the schools. In con- 
sequence, every one so trained must place a note of 
interrogation after all the biblical accounts of mir- 
acles. Now, when it is remembered that one of the 
great churches of Christendom relies on these ac- 
counts of miracles and the continuation of such mir- 
acles as the basis of its claims and almost the whole 
of the rest of Christendom from ancient times down 
almost, if not entirely, to our own time have believed 
that the great traditional doctrines of the faith 
repose on the reality of these miraculous events, the 
spiritual situation created thereby must seem fairly 
revolutionary. To many people the miracles have 
become a source of distress and not of consolation. 
In this way it has been brought about that the whole 
question of the reality and meaning of the super- 
natural must be faced anew. 

Thirdly, we have to reckon with the rise and the 
growing influence of the modern science of history. 
Its conscience for facts is associated with a pitiless 
throwing into the discard of all the most beautiful, 
as well as the most repulsive, representations of 



The Method of Study 25 

events whose origin lies in the mere fancy or the na- 
tive love of the dramatic. It is governed by the de- 
termination to discover, if possible, the meaning 
of human life by discerning the forces that operate 
immanently within it rather than trace its changes to 
interference from without. Naturally enough, it has 
brought into question the trustworthiness of many 
of those accounts which have seemed to multitudes 
of Christians indispensable to the assurance of the 
faith. In this way the origin of our faith and the 
relation particularly of Jesus Christ and the events 
of his life to it are brought once more under critical 
review. These difficulties must be met squarely. 

Fourthly, since the days of John Locke scientific 
interest has been directed increasingly to the field 
of the inner life of men. In due time it has led 
to an examination of the nature and meaning of 
religion as a form of psychic action or experience. 
From an interest in the manner in which a religion 
was given to men our minds have been turned to 
the manner in which it rises in the human heart. 
Consequently, there has been a transfer of emphasis 
from its outer forms, its doctrines and its means of 
propagation to its inner character and its inherent 
worth to the natural life of men. In this way the in- 
ner affinity of Christianity with other faiths, as well 
as its distinction from them, has been set before our 
minds as of more significance than the manner 
in which it was ushered into the world. The modern 
Christian missionary movement, instead of opposing 



26 Creative Christianity 

this tendency, has confirmed it. Evidently, then, to- 
day the interpreter of the Christian faith will concern 
himself more deeply with the manner in which the 
faith lives in his own soul and the souls of other men 
than with the forms in which it has been professedly 
set forth. He will view it in its inner relation to 
the whole of the processes of the mind in which it 
dwells rather than as something superadded to the 
life of men from without. 

It is quite an inadequate estimate of the seriousness 
of the spiritual situation now confronting us to say 
that there must be a restatement of the Christian 
faith in terms of the thought of the present day. 
That indeed must be done, but much more. We must 
rediscover it, so to say, by living through its history 
afresh. It must not be assumed that there are avail- 
able for our use any fixed standard tests for the final 
determination of what is truly Christian as distinct 
from that which claims to be Christian. When we 
turn to the liturgies, the creeds, the organizations and 
the personal and social customs which have been 
commonly taken as representative of the Christian 
faith we can find no fixed external standard by 
which we may decide how far they are Christian. 
They are important as showing some of the ways 
in which our religion came to expression in the past. 
These are not necessarily the most significant. Per- 
chance we shall discover that the standard is to be 
found in the future rather than in the past. Per- 
chance we shall see that that which is most truly 



The Method of Study 27 

Christian is yet to be. It may be that its judgment 
day, like that which awaits each of us, is still to 
come. 

I have spoken of crises in Christian history. 
These are always significant because they bring to 
light the character of the forces which have long 
been at work but whose presence was somewhat 
hidden. There are three that stand out pre-em- 
inently : — The first of these occurred when the Chris- 
tian Gospel passed out from the limitations to which 
it was subjected in the Jewish community into the 
great Graeco-Oriental world and came under the ne- 
cessity of adaptation to the spiritual conditions pre- 
valent in it. The second occurred when it passed 
the boundaries of that world westward and was com- 
pelled to seek adjustment to the needs of the half- 
civilized but energetic peoples of western Europe. 
And the third great crisis occurred when it was con- 
fronted with the perplexing complex of influences 
that made the Protestant Revolution. In the first 
of these instances the danger lest the youthful faith 
be dissipated in the medley of traditions, customs, 
superstitions, myths, allegories and cosmic spec- 
ulations that flooded the lands of the eastern Medi- 
terranean, was met by the transformation of the 
original Gospel into a body of mysteries, or sac- 
raments, as the indispensable media of the impar- 
tation of the divine life, on the one hand; and, on 
the other hand, the theoretical basis of these mys- 
teries was laid in the creation of the Nicene Creed 



28 Creative Christianity 

with its doctrine of three persons in one divine 
essence and of two natures in the one divine person, 
Jesus Christ. The second crisis was met by the 
elaboration of a perfected system of sacraments in- 
tended to minister to all the various spiritual needs 
of men, the perfection of a priestly order to whose 
hands the sacraments were committed, and the prep- 
aration of a system of rules for the regulation of 
the conduct of the individual and of a body of doc- 
trines to satisfy his mind. In other words, the peni- 
tential system and the scholastic theology grew out 
of the second crisis. And the third crisis 
issued in the institution of national churches 
to serve the interests of both state and church, 
in the simplification of the traditional ceremonial 
to meet the desire of the common man to exper- 
ience immediate personal communion with God, 
in the intellectual interpretation of the Christian re- 
ligion in "Confessions of Faith," and in the erection 
of a final and sufficient standard of faith and prac- 
tice in the Bible. 

Our present interest in these three achievements 
lies in certain assumptions common to them all. 
They may be reduced to the three following : First : 
that with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world 
an original supernatural deposit was committed to 
men through a divine intervention in the natural 
and normal course of things in this world. To 
the Catholic, this supernatural deposit consists of 
a positive heavenly grace communicated through 



The Method of Study 29 

certain tangible or visible facts and forms, known 
as "mysteries" to the Greeks and "sacraments" to 
the Romans. To the Protestant the supernatural 
deposit is of "truth" or doctrines communicated to 
the spirit of man directly by God himself (but, to 
the Catholic, doctrines have a sacramental charac- 
ter — they are "mysteries," not necessarily to be 
understood but obediently accepted). Second: the 
bestowment of this deposit is inseparably connected 
with a series of facts, similarly of a supernatural 
order, the knowledge of which facts is preserved in 
the Christian tradition. With the Catholic, these 
supernatural facts continue to occur as an abiding 
testimony to the presence of sacramental power 
among men, but, with the Protestant these superna- 
tural occurrences are no longer necessary, since the 
truth they attest is given once and forever. Third : 
these authoritative traditions are given in the canon- 
ical Scriptures (say the Protestants) or in the pro- 
nouncements of an official priestly order or in both 
(say the Catholics). The detailed development of 
these capital assumptions as they appear in the var- 
iant Catholic and Protestant theories need not de- 
tain us further. It is sufficient to have pointed out 
that the two chief divisions of Christendom hold 
these fundamental tenets in common. 

It is scarcely necessary to point out that all three 
of these assumptions stand or fall together. The 
first in order is the first in importance according to 
the traditional interpretation. If it be not granted, the 



30 Creative Christianity 

special interest in the other two falls away. All three 
have come increasingly under the criticism of Chris- 
tian men of late. It is doubted whether any absolute 
external authority in matters of faith has been pro- 
vided or is needed. Similarly, it is doubted whether 
the series of events recorded as occurring at the be- 
ginning of the Christian faith or at any stage of its 
progress are to be considered as supernatural in the 
sense commonly intended hitherto by that term. Sim- 
ilarly also, the question whether there was an original 
supernatural (i. e., in the sense just spoken of) 
deposit and, if so, what it was, is now open to per- 
fectly free discussion without prejudice to the Chris- 
tian character of him who raises the question. With 
the gradual disappearance of sacramentalism this 
assumption is coming to be seen as unnecessary and 
even as an obstacle to the progress of the Christian 
faith and to the permanency of its hold on the hearts 
of intelligent men. The history of Christian doctrine 
and practice has made it clear that both the form- 
ulations of Christian dogmas and confessions of 
faith and the establishment of sacraments were called 
forth by special circumstances and were meant to 
serve special purposes that no longer obtain among 
multitudes of Christian people. So much so is 
this the case that it is no longer necessary in such 
an assembly as this to argue the question in general. 
I may add that I do not think that the situation, as 
I have tried to describe it, is regrettable. So far 
from being significant of a spiritual decline or a 



The Method of Study 31 

loss of confidence in the divine worth and perman- 
ency of the Christian faith, it seems to be indicative 
of a growing clearness of the consciousness of our 
relation to God and an immediacy of the assurance of 
his favor that have led inevitably to the discarding of 
those artificial supports, as a sound man throws away 
the crutches which he found at one time necessary. 

There is, however, a certain phase of the view 
that a final and sufficient authority for faith can be 
found in an objective deposit in the past that must 
engage our attention for a few moments because of 
the prominence given to it in some quarters at 
the present time. I refer to the tendency to test all 
that is professedly Christian by falling back upon 
the certified teachings of Jesus. 

Accompanying the growing dissatisfaction with 
the creeds of the churches as standards of Christian 
faith and with the view that the Bible in its entirety 
constitutes the final authority, there has come a 
regressive search for the Christian originals. One 
of the results of this historical investigation is the 
certainty that the authors of the New Testament 
writings were not consciously presenting themselves 
before the world as having been specially commis- 
sioned to prescribe for their fellowmen for all time 
to come the doctrines to be believed as the condition 
of salvation. It has also become plain that if they 
had made in any instance a claim of this sort it 
must now be subjected to those tests which are ordin- 
arily applied to all professions of special privilege 



32 Creative Christianity 

or power. That has been pretty generally granted 
in our day. But with the disappearance of "apos- 
tolic authority" in the current sense there has come 
a custom of falling back upon what is designated 
"the teachings of Jesus" as the ground-work of 
Christianity, all other teachings professedly Chris- 
tian, whether in the Bible or out of it, being subject- 
ed to the test of agreement with his. This view 
represents, I say, the final remnant of the assumption 
that there was an original deposit definitely given to 
men in the creation of the Christian faith and that 
this must be preserved in its purity and integrity if 
the faith itself is to be preserved. We need not stay 
even a moment at this point to develop the argument 
that this is, after all, a legalistic interpretation of 
Christianity or to show its defects on that account. 
But we do wish to point out that this attitude toward 
our problem raises two important questions. First- 
ly : do the traditional teachings of Jesus furnish an 
adequate basis for the Christian faith as it has been 
seen in actual operation in history ? Secondly : can 
it be affirmed with confidence that w T e really possess 
the teachings of Jesus in any such form that they can 
be called specifically his, as distinguished or distin- 
guishable from the views held by his followers con- 
cerning him and his teachings? An adequate reply 
to the first of these questions must await a fuller 
treatment of the entire theme of these lectures but 
a preliminary statement may be made at the present 
moment. 



The Method of Study 33 

In the first place, then, it is quite debatable wheth- 
er an orderly collection and arrangement of the 
Master's teachings, supposing it could be made with 
certainty, would truly represent to us what he taught. 
It is possible that such a presentation of his teachings 
might disclose logical contradictions or, at least, 
disharmonies. For there is no convincing evidence 
that the Master possessed or even sought to frame a 
connected and ordered body of thought or doctrines 
after the manner of the philosopher or professed 
theologian. It is extremely unlikely, indeed, that 
this was the case. The narratives and sayings found 
in the first three of our canonical Gospels unite in 
conveying the impression that Jesus' teachings were 
of the occasionalist type. To a considerable degree 
the Gospel of John conveys the same impression. 
His discourse was not in the ordered form charac- 
teristic of the professional preacher. The very at- 
tempts made by the evangelists to present here or 
there an ordered discourse disclose the work on their 
part of piecing together detached utterances. His 
utterances consisted mostly of stories, similes, ejac- 
ulations, moral injunctions and warnings, words 
of consolation, pity and encouragement to the dis- 
tressed, religious exhortations, prayers, meditations 
and personal conversations often directed in their 
course by the queries or responses of his hearers. 
He was an itinerant oriental teacher. Both his pub- 
lic utterances and his private conversations sprang 
commonly out of peculiar circumstances and in not 



34 Creative Christianity 

a few instances the time, place and reason for his 
speaking as he did have been lost to view. So that 
it is quite likely to turn out that the orderly and 
systematic arrangement of the so-called teachings of 
Jesus might issue in giving to them a meaning 
which they did not have and could not have when 
they were first uttered. It is even possible — and we 
can say it with the very deepest reverence for him 
in our hearts — that if all the teachings of Jesus 
were brought together in the exact form in which 
he gave them there might be found among them 
some that would not commend themselves as fixed 
and final to the faith of the most intelligent and 
devout Christians of the present day. Men cannot 
be called upon to believe things simply because of 
the name that is attached to them but they only 
believe truly when that which comes to them from 
without is at the same time the fruitage of their most 
prolonged and profoundest experiences. In this way 
there always arises a subjective evaluation of all 
that is offered to our faith and in this way also it 
becomes impossible to place the whole of what is 
offered upon a common level or to regard every 
part as equally vital. In the end it will be found 
that what is to be placed at the centre and what 
at the periphery of the teaching of Jesus is deter- 
mined for each of us by the relative depths of their 
inwardness to our own hearts' life. 

In the second place — to recall a point made a 
moment ago — the true significance and value of what 



The Method of Study 35 

Jesus said are never to be discovered simply by put- 
ting his teachings by themselves. Not only do identi- 
cal words spoken under different circumstances take 
on a different meaning but they take on a different 
meaning on the lips of different speakers especially 
when the subject is one in which the deepest emo- 
tional, intellectual and moral interests are at stake. 
The words of no man are to be understood apart 
from an insight into his character. We must see 
the speaker either actually or through the enlightened 
imagination if we are to know truly what he means. 
This is particularly true of one whose whole person- 
ality, and not merely his words, impressed itself 
mightily on men and constituted the decisive factor 
in the crisis of their lives. Consequently, when we 
study the words of Jesus we must fuse them with 
his deeds and experiences as these are reflected upon 
us from the minds of the men to whom we owe the 
earliest portrait of him. This brings us to our 
second question. 

Do we really possess the teachings of Jesus in 
such definite form and with such correctness of 
representation that they can be called specifically 
his? For a satisfactory answer to this question we 
are dependent on the work of the higher criticism. 
The time at our disposal forbids anything beyond 
a summary of the outcome of the immense labors of 
this branch of historical science in its relation to 
our problem, the positions of different critics and the 
details of their findings being necessarily passed by. 



36 Creative Christianity 

We turn first to the Gospel of John. This work 
is the product of long sustained and profound reflec- 
tion on the meaning and worth of the career of 
Jesus. The writer has reached a highly developed 
interpretation of it and plainly desires to set this 
forth in his evangel. In comparison with the other 
Gospels, it is emphatically a presentation of the 
discourses of Jesus. But narrative and discourse are 
brought together in such a way, for the most part, 
that the events selected furnish a suitable occasion 
for the pronouncement of the messages. Just how 
far the character and the content of the narratives 
were determined in accordance with the author's pur- 
pose in the discourses it may not be possible for any 
one to decide but it was very probably so to a large 
extent. It is quite in keeping with the opening words 
of this Gospel and the tone that pervades it through- 
out to say that it is the discourses that supply the 
motive for the delineation of the happenings and 
not the happenings that supply the best clue to the 
character of the discourses. The latter also reflect 
mostly a type of thinking very different in many of 
their features from that which prevails in the other 
Gospels. Then, too, the author writes with the dis- 
tinctly asserted aim of establishing in the minds of 
his readers a thesis which he states, and the opening 
words of his Gospel indicate that a philosophical 
interpretation of Jesus' career has taken possession 
of his mind. Naturally, therefore, the discourses 
are to be taken as setting forth a certain construction 



The Method of Study 37 

of the meaning of Jesus' words and deeds expressed, 
in the author's manner of thought and speech. 
Whether or no there is at any place in this Gospel 
an exact reproduction of Jesus' sayings it is im- 
possible to say, but the discourses certainly express 
the author's view of what Jesus meant in the whole 
sweep of his life's purpose. The fourth Gospel is 
an interpretation of Jesus by an author who lived 
two generations later and the interpretation reflects 
the deep and broad experiences through which he and 
other Christians had passed in the interval. Such 
an experience as theirs must have brought an en- 
richment of meaning to all that they had learned of 
Jesus. 

The verdict we have reached respecting the Gospel 
of John leads to a similar verdict respecting the 
other Gospels, though many critics are loth to part 
with the inherited belief that the sayings of Jesus 
reported in them are his own peculiarly and that 
the acts described really occurred in the time and 
manner presented to us. We cannot go into the 
question of certain hypothetical documents which 
are supposed to underlie these Gospels. The hy- 
pothesis of an original Markan document under- 
lying our present Mark and source of the narratives 
in Matthew and Luke paralleling our Mark, the 
hypothesis of an unknown document or documents 
which are the common source of the parallel dis- 
courses in these Gospels, as well as several hypotheses 
respecting the origin of portions peculiar to a single 



38 Creative Christianity 

work, may very well be true. The questions hereby 
raised are all of much interest, but for our present 
purposes it seems to matter little how many of them 
are verifiable so long as we remember that the ulti- 
mate originals are not documents at all but stories 
and teachings circulated by oral transmission from 
one person to another, one community to another 
and one generation to another, supported and vivified 
by the florid imagination and native dramatic power 
of the oriental mind undisciplined and untamed by 
the severe rules of an unemotional logic. It is 
well to remember too that the Gospels are the deposit 
of the experiences of more than one generation of 
Christians of this type, whose struggles to maintain 
and propagate their faith amid poverty, persecution 
and conflict must inevitably have been reflected in 
the recitals that finally took the form in which we 
have them now preserved. 

It also matters little, perhaps, if we do not know 
whose hands put our Gospels into their present form, 
but their reasons for doing so are of great account. 
For one thing, the reader is impressed with their 
evident sincerity. When they affirm that Jesus did 
or said thus and so, they believe that they are 
speaking truth, though they think of truth, not in 
our modern matter-of -external- fact, logical or mathe- 
matical way of viewing it, but according to the 
worthfulness of the effects the things that were done 
had upon themselves and would have, so they hoped, 
on others. Not as we might feel obliged to do, 



The Method of Study 39 

have they detached themselves from the narratives 
nor are they quoting in cold scientific spirit the 
stories and sayings that had been handed down, but 
everywhere they are giving us their own hearts' 
convictions of what Jesus was to them and would 
be to the world. Any one who is familiar with the 
freedom which the oriental uses in his weaving to- 
gether of the strands of a story that has been given 
to him or in his composition of a message which 
he is to transmit will appreciate this consideration. 
It need not surprise us, therefore, if we discover that 
their reports of the sayings of Jesus represent not 
so certainly the words he actually used as they do 
their belief as to what he must have said. To a 
degree we all have been feeling that it is so with 
these writings and because of the tenderness and 
the grandeur of the faith that is expressed in them 
we have had a feeling of shrinking, with reason, 
from a treatment of them that would tend to sacri- 
fice their religious worth to the strict historicity or 
non-historicity of their accounts from the de facto 
point of view. 

When the question of the historicity of the Gospels 
is now raised among us it is meant to ask whether 
certain purported events of those days, which are 
quite unparalleled in our times and would certainly 
not be accepted as plain accounts of real occurrences 
by many intelligent people if the events were repre- 
sented as contemporary with our own times, can be 
accepted as accounts of matters of fact of that time 



40 Creative Christianity 

or of any time. Here is the plain question : Can we 
believe, as these writings seem to affirm, that the 
natural order and connection of events which are 
universally accepted among educated people of our 
day were non-existent in those days or that this 
system, if it did exist in those days, was broken 
into from without for a special purpose, even if 
that purpose was the highest conceivable? The 
traditional apologetical answer to this latter question 
has been in the affirmative, but the answer by the 
scientifically trained college man of today is as dis- 
tinctly in the negative. It will be said also by him 
that in the examination of the question it is essential 
that the characteristic habits of thought and speech 
of those days be kept in mind and that, through dis- 
robing the narratives of the drapery thrown around 
them by the popular imagination, we may hope to 
find the substratum of plain fact underlying. Can 
this be done with certainty? 

Permit me to illustrate this point by introducing 
an account recently given me by a lady medical mis- 
sionary in India of an event in her ministry of heal- 
ing. The story is here given in her own words 
as far as I can recall them : — "In the course of my 
professional work I was called to attend to a little 
sick boy in one of the jungle villages. The mo- 
ment I saw him I knew that I had a serious brain 
case on my hands. For his body had become rigid 
and as he lay on his back it described a curve, so 
that he rested on his heels and the back of his head. 



The Method of Study 41 

However, I went to work to do the best I could 
under the circumstances, and had success. Before 
very long the little laddie was fairly well again. A 
short time afterwards I heard his mother telling the 
story of his recovery to a group of women sitting 
round her, and this is the way the story ran : 'My 
boy was dead for three days. The healing woman 
came and laid her hands upon him and, behold! 
he lived.' " Here we have the characteristic story- 
telling of the oriental mind, innocent of our methods 
of training. We observe its native dramatic power 
here at work unhindered. It delights in the mar- 
vellous, the mysterious, the miraculous. Its narra- 
tives are a series of pictures colored with the rich 
image^ so conveniently at hand. The popular 
oriental mind revels in this, but it knows little and 
cares less for the close concatenation of causes and 
effects which seems so important to us. 

Let us suppose that, instead of a production of 
the free imagination of the Indian woman's un- 
trained mind, we had before us the physician's own 
expert report of the case given to an assembly of 
medical men. Then we should find the story pre- 
sented from the standpoint of the profession. It 
would be an exact and accurate account in technical 
terms of what actually occurred, as the physician saw 
it. The attention of the hearer would be attracted 
to those features of the case which seemed the most 
significant from the point of view of medical science. 
To medical men this account would be entirely 



42 Creative Christianity 

natural and the physician's language would interest 
them only in so far as it enabled them to visualize 
the processes that marked the achievement of the 
healing art. Yet how few of us who are untrained 
in the technique of medical science could gather 
from the narrative an intelligent view of what really 
occurred! Or suppose, again, that, instead of the 
Indian woman's semi-poetical representation of the 
occurrence or the physician's professional statement, 
we had before us the narrative of an eye-witness of 
the physician's work who had never come under 
professional instruction in this field but was pos- 
sessed of the intelligence of the ordinary modern 
man amongst us. Then we should have still another 
type of narrative. It would be such as the historian 
could make use of as a correct statement of matter- 
of-fact, though it might furnish only a very partial 
explanation of what occurred, so that the use to be 
made of it would be very limited. 

It is plain that the manner in which the historian 
could make use of these narratives would depend a 
good deal on the particular aim of his investigation. 
If it were to write an account of the progress of 
medical science and practice in its treatment of affec- 
tions of the brain tissue, he would employ the 
materials of the physician's recital exclusively. If 
his aim were to set before his readers the quality of 
the service the missionaries are rendering to suffer- 
ing humanity in those regions where disease and 
pain are very prevalent and medical care difficult to 



The Method of Study 43 

obtain, he would depend mainly on the matter-of- 
fact statement of our non-professional man of aver- 
age intelligence, a man who has as little of the love 
of the mysterious and supernatural as he has of 
technical medical knowledge. But if, instead of 
either of these, his purpose were to acquaint himself 
and others with the character and power of the 
spiritual impact of the Christian spirit upon the 
minds of India's jungle dwellers, the woman's dra- 
matic story would be material to his purpose. She had 
access to no other means of representing the marvel. 
Her statement is valuable material for the historian 
because it discloses in a way in which neither of the 
others can, the working of the Christian spirit upon 
the minds of people of that kind. It may be that 
her story is the most important of the three because 
it brings us face to face with the facts which are 
the most significant of all to us. Her story is to 
us the dramatization of a spiritual process and it 
touches our sympathies in a manner in which, per- 
haps, the others could not. 

Where, then, do the stories of Jesus' words and 
doings belong? In what particular lies their chief 
interest for us? Unhesitatingly we decide, not to 
the first of the three mentioned. Precise scientific 
knowledge is utterly lacking. Do they belong, then, 
to the second class? In a minor degree only. The 
connectedness which we look for between the parts 
of a modern story is found only in certain places 
in the narratives. While the writers undoubtedly do 



44 Creative Christianity 

attempt to give information concerning the origin 
of their faith, it is not usually traced to the normal 
working of forces operative in human life generally, 
as we perceive them, but to forces of a different 
order. While we, with our training in historical 
perspective and method would fain make out of the 
stories an account of the life of Jesus it is quite 
certain that this is not the aim of these narratives. 
The Gospels and narrative elements found elsewhere 
in the New Testament belong distinctly to the third 
class. Everywhere the characteristic oriental mind, 
untouched by the methods of our schools, is at work 
dramatizing everything, setting forth with all the 
power of religious emotion the coming in upon the 
lives of men of a miraculous intervention of unseen 
powers of the world above and the world below. 
What the Gospels and other New Testament writings 
disclose to us is the impression which the career 
of Jesus made upon the minds of men at the time 
of the writing and shortly before. 

If, now, the question is asked, "What was it that 
really happened as the result of which these writings 
appeared?" we must say that if it is meant hereby to 
ask, "How many of the deeds and words ascribed 
to Jesus occurred just as they are represented as 
having occurred?" we must say that while the ques- 
tion is legitimate and even inevitable, the prospect 
of getting a satisfactory answer to it by the methods 
of historical investigation is very poor. If one 
attempts to give a definite answer it is more likely 



The Method of Study 45 

to disclose his presuppositions than it is to release the 
external facts reported by eye-witnesses. Not only 
so, but even if we could settle upon a reliable record 
of the observable external facts of which New Tes- 
tament records are a representation, it is by no means 
certain that much would be gained thereby for our 
religious purposes. For the ultimate interest we, 
as religious people, have in these accounts, lies in the 
narrator's representative state of mind which is dis- 
closed in the accounts. The truly important event, 
that which gives the New Testament its tremendous 
hold upon us, is the production of the state of mind 
which appears in the narratives and the other writ- 
ings and which has been communicated with growing 
power to succeeding generations of people. The 
external events happened a long time ago and will 
never happen again. They are forever past. But 
Christianity is surely more than a memory. The 
state of mind into which these early Christians 
came is not a thing of the past. The spiritual im- 
pact of it has persisted with ever expanding power 
down to our times and seems destined to continue 
while the world shall last. The creative force of the 
faith that utters itself in the New Testament is 
what we are thinking of at this point and our aim 
is to understand the meaning and permanent char- 
acter of the spiritual forces that came into action 
in the life of believers at the time. 

When this point in our reflection on the genius 
of the Christian faith is reached, it becomes evident 



46 Creative Christianity 

that we are confronted at the outset with the demand 
that we undertake a critical estimate of the worth of 
of what is found in the New Testament. It also 
becomes evident that this estimate cannot be intel- 
ligently and adequately arrived at until the utterances 
of religious faith found in the New Testament have 
been placed in an unbroken chain of continuity with 
the manifold expressions of religious faith found 
throughout the entire Christian era to the present 
time. As students we can avail ourselves of no 
"short cut" to the discovery of the worth of Christian 
faith at any period in the long story of its progress. 
If we would really come to know broadly and deeply 
what it was that came to make its home in human 
hearts when Jesus came to the world we must live 
in our own souls through the successive stages of 
the life of the Christian faith and let each stamp 
its character on our sympathetic mind. 

We come here, at last, to our question : What is 
it that comes to the spirits of men in the Christian 
religion? What is it the Christian religion brings to 
pass in the life of humanity as its own achievement? 
Of what is Christianity creative in the world ? What 
is its genius? 

A reply may be made to this question, of course, 
by pointing to the creeds and confessions of faith 
or the systems of doctrine or belief that have been 
formulated as the result of the impact of the Chris- 
tian faith on the minds of men. Or we may be 
directed to the liturgies of the churches or its organ- 



The Method of Study 47 

ized activity as exhibiting its productivity in the 
realm of emotion or will. But, even so, it is neces- 
sary in respect to all these to determine in how far 
they are genuine products of the faith and the out- 
come of such a critical estimate is likely to be the 
fixing of an irreducible minimum of each of these 
as constituting the essence of Christianity. Our 
reply will take a different direction. We know 
nothing of an irreducible minimum in this area. We 
know of nothing that has remained or can remain 
unchanged from the inception of the Christian faith 
down to the present. To conceive the Christian's 
task as that of conserving something given once for 
all is to deprive it of its momentum and blot out its 
vision. 

In accordance with what was said at an earlier 
point in this lecture we shall also hope to avoid any 
arbitrary determination of the issue, like that of 
selecting any one of the multitude of heart-searching 
and will-subduing utterances of the New Testament 
and making that cardinal to the whole discussion. 
Nor shall we depend on any differentiation of the 
teachings of Jesus from the teachings of his first 
followers, even if the two should not be identical, 
inasmuch as this distinction always turns out in 
the end more or less arbitrary and unsatisfactory. 
Nor, again, shall we make the integrated and organ- 
ized content of the New Testament teachings — price- 
less spiritual heritage though it is — our final and 
perfect test of all that is professedly Christian. For 



48 Creative Christianity 

it may very well be that in the depth of spirituality 
experienced by the authors and in the period of time 
and range of human history covered by these writ- 
ings there was insufficient opportunity for the ulti- 
mate purpose and highest motive power of the 
Christian faith to become clear. Nor, once again, 
can we be content to base our interpretation directly 
upon the creeds and confessions of faith that have 
appeared at times of spiritual crisis in the Christian 
movement. While these are indicative of the man- 
ner in which the genius of Christianity was unfold- 
ing itself they all bear the stamp of the peculiar situa- 
tion the framers of those statements had to face 
and the intellectual, emotional and moral character- 
istics of the men who composed them, with all the 
limitations incident to their condition. Besides, it 
is quite uncertain that these formulations are the 
most significant thing Christians have done to ex- 
hibit their true faith. It may very well be that the 
life of the private Christian family, the social cus- 
toms they have followed, the forms of government 
they have set up and the liturgies or other forms 
of worship in their churches are as significant as 
their doctrines. 

In other words, the genius of the Christian faith 
is to be discovered through a study of the whole 
career of the Christian people in its great general 
characters. For, be it remembered that, while we 
speak abstractly of Christianity as if it were a some- 
thing in itself, it is found nowhere but in Chris- 



The Method of Study 49 

tians — not in a book or a ritual or an organization, 
but just in human persons. The story of the Chris- 
tian religion is not at bottom a story of those things 
which more or less correctly, whether abstractly or 
concretely, are taken to represent it, but it is the 
story of the people who came long ago under the 
power of a great personality and continue in their 
loyalty to him. When we seek to designate the dis- 
tinctive character of these people it is not necessary 
that we point to any positive addition that may be 
said to have been made to the native resources or 
capital of men. It may be that what we call the 
Christian religion is just the native inner power of 
the human spirit coming into action in a distinctive 
way. It may be that the coming of Jesus among 
men released hidden energies of their spirits and 
that their action is so constantly creative that, so to 
say, the Christianity of today will be less than true 
Christianity tomorrow. 

There remains but one word more to say in this 
introductory lecture. I refer to the subjective (per- 
sonal) factor which is indispensable in the interpreta- 
tion of the Christian faith. All interpretation is at 
bottom a species of evaluation. The interpreter 
makes his approach, selects his material and places 
his emphasis according to his hitherto estimate of 
what is worth ful. That estimate is no merely ex- 
ternal, scientific appraisement but springs from the 
inmost experiences of personal good. This is not 
an arbitrary element in the solution of the problem, 



50 Creative Christianity 

though it is subjective. If the experiences referred 
to were the individual's alone, then the danger of 
arbitrariness might be serious but this danger dis- 
appears progressively with the discovery of a com- 
munity life of which they are the source or the 
product. 

At this point we are reminded of the Roman 
Catholic contention that the power to make a true 
interpretation of the Christian faith lies solely and 
wholly within the Church. Over against the Protest- 
ant affirmation that every man has the power and 
the right to interpret the revealed will of God for 
himself stands the Catholic insistence that we are 
to be protected from the caprice and arbitrariness 
of the individual by the authoritative tradition pre- 
served in its purity and integrity within the Church. 
Underneath this view of the matter is to be found 
a profound truth perverted, as we have so often 
found, in the interest of an ecclesiastical order. It 
must be acknowledged that the individual who has 
within himself, independently of others, the power 
to interpret the Christian religion is a hypothetical 
personality. In what minute degree, I wonder, has 
an illiterate Hottentot, who has never lived within 
the atmosphere of a Christian community the power 
to apprehend the meaning of the Christian faith? 
The great spiritual forces that have come into action 
in human life where this faith has had its home are 
nearly altogether alien to him. They have not 
entered into the texture of his life. He has not 



The Method of Study 51 

had a communion with others in these things. The 
whence of his spiritual life is vastly other than the 
Christian. The New Testament with all its uni- 
versalism of appeal would remain mostly a sealed 
book to him who had no contact with Christian per- 
sonalities. I have chosen this extreme example in 
order to bring out the principle. How differently 
equipped is he who from his infancy inward has 
breathed the air of the Christian family, or the 
church, the community and the nation in which 
Christian grace, mercy and peace have been the 
chief forces moulding the lives of the people! In 
thousands of ways of which at the best he is only 
dimly conscious these have wrought his spiritual con- 
stitution and made him the kind of man he is. The 
people to whom he owes this endowment were in 
their turn made what they are by the quality of 
Christian life to which they fell heirs. In other 
words, we owe the type of spirituality which we 
have to a spiritual inheritance from the past. Apart 
from this we could never have come to be what we 
are. Thus the power to interpret the faith, so far 
from being an endowment obtained ab extra, is just 
itself a gift imparted to us by the faith as it has 
lived in other persons and through them been trans- 
mitted to ourselves. Wherefore, the very interpreta- 
tion I would now offer you has been constituted for 
me by the inward condition of the community of 
Christians, large or small, to whom I owe my very 
self. 



52 Creative Christianity 

And yet, the whole truth of the matter does not 
thereby come to light. For the interpretation which 
you or I may place upon the Christian faith reflects 
the faith only as it has been transfused by the fire 
of our personal selfhood. No man's personality is 
purely a product of the community's life. No more 
is it merely a duplicate of any other life that was 
ever lived. In that transfusion of the traditional 
Christianity that takes place in any one of us it is 
become somewhat other than it was before it became 
the centre of our soul's life. For there are within 
each of us endowments that are peculiarly our own. 
There is truly an "isolation" of personality from 
personality that grows increasingly "defined" as 
Tennyson puts it, with the years. This makes prog- 
ress possible. Thus the Christian faith is construed 
within each of us somewhat differently from the way 
in which it ever was construed before we came. The 
faith of others, as it impinged upon our inward life 
awoke into action the energies of our souls and, by 
the action of these energies of ours in response, the 
faith itself became in each of us what it never would 
or could have been without us. In this way the 
Christian tradition is now in process of evolution. 
The Christianity of yesterday was creative of the 
Christianity of today but at the same time the Chris- 
tianity of today is more and somewhat other than 
the Christianity of yesterday. For it recreates that 
which came from the past and makes it new. 

Thus, then, we may say that the interpreter of 



The Method of Study 53 

Christianity remakes it by his very act of interpreta- 
tion and the Christianity which he passes on to others 
by his interpretation possesses a character different 
in degree from that which he received. The inter- 
preter is always a prophet. He puts forth, as it 
were, a faith that is yet to be. Christianity is cease- 
lessly creative. It is ceaselessly in process of being 
created. 

Accordingly, our task in these lectures is to point 
out the manner in which the inner life of the Chris- 
tian people has fulfilled itself by constantly recon- 
structing the forces operative in it, as the evangel 
wins new converts and as the context of their lives 
calls forth spiritual activities of a new kind. We 
shall specify three most significant directions in 
which this creative action has moved. Firstly, we 
shall study Christianity as the progressive discovery 
of the perfect personality. Secondly, we shall ob- 
serve it in action bringing into being the better world. 
Thirdly, we shall find in it the power to disclose the 
meaning of the cosmos, moulding the universe as 
an intellectual, aesthetic and volitional unity into the 
likeness of the spirit that dominates the lives of the 
Christian people. 



CHAPTER II. 

LECTURE II. THE DISCOVERY OF THE PERFECT 
PERSONALITY 

THE use of the term personality in the designa- 
tion of the subject of this lecture constitutes 
an invitation for each of us to participate in 
the stimulating discussions which a philosophical 
treatment of this idea has called forth in our 
times. That so much attention should now be 
given to the study of personality in circles of 
learning and in the literature of reflection is 
suggestive of the centre of interest in the minds 
of Protestant religious people. The limitations 
of our present task forbid an excursion into 
that attractive field, and the natural presumption on 
my part that you are all in possession of, at least, 
a working apprehension of the psychological and 
philosophical implications of the conception of per- 
sonality renders an undertaking of the kind men- 
tioned unnecessary here. However, I think that I 
may fitly make a few brief statements preliminary 
to our discussion. 

In the life of every human being there arises 
sooner or later the power of being aware of one's 
54 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 55 

self as distinguishable from all things else and of 
affirming one's selfhood in the face of the whole 
assembly of facts which constitute our field of knowl- 
edge and action. At what point of time in the inner 
and outer life of a child the beginning of this action 
can be discovered neither memory nor the most care- 
ful psychical research enables us to determine, but 
when once the experience of self-awareness occurs 
it is never lost in the spiritual life of any normal 
human being. As this mysterious power progres- 
sively unfolds itself in life it seeks to appropriate 
the whole body of existence and relate it to itself 
as material for its self-action and to maintain its 
own dignity and worth in the face of all the forces 
that impinge upon it and threaten it with destruction. 

It is not only this power of self-distinction from 
all things else that calls forth our wonder. We are 
equally impressed with its power to recognize other 
selves of its own order — in whatsoever manner it 
may be done. It discovers itself in discovering them 
and by living in and with them arrives at its own 
selfhood. Thus there appears the triangle of self- 
consciousness — the "I," the "thou" and the "he," — 
each of them indispensable to the others. Person- 
ality is inseparable from this fellowship and in the 
perfection of this fellowship finds its own perfection. 

The interest in personality is the highest interest 
of life, whether it be in the realm of theory or the 
realm of practice. The story of its self-fulfillment 
is the most thrilling that can be written, for all 



56 Creative Christianity 

others are tributary to it. The story of the progress 
of science and art, of industry and commerce, of the 
social and economic life becomes in its climax the 
story of the manner in which men come to them- 
selves in this world, of the manner in which they 
stamp the qualities of their spirit upon everything 
they meet and of their successful assertion of 
supremacy over the whole world of objective fact. 
We feel that the theme of our discussion at this 
time introduces us to the very heart of human life. 

It is fitting that an attempt to exhibit the genius 
of Christianity should begin at this point. Our 
exposition begins naturally with the books of the 
New Testament, since these are the earliest records 
we possess of our faith and since these writings 
concern themselves pre-eminently with the career and 
significance of that personality that has dominated 
the course of Christianity — Jesus Christ. In at- 
tempting to say anything at all about this theme I 
am assuming that the education which the young 
people are now receiving in the schools is of the 
most serious import and am proceeding on the as- 
sumption that the spiritual needs which this educa- 
tion has created in their hearts must be met squarely 
if they are to be the future apostles of our faith. 
It is these destined leaders of the people I have in 
mind in the present discussions. 

Lei us suppose that we had in our midst today 
a young man who, having passed through the intel- 
lectual training given in one of our colleges, was in 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 57 

possession of the range of knowledge and highly 
disciplined habits of mind imparted by the prevailing 
methods of education in our higher institutions of 
learning, and who, while well acquainted with the 
mythology and legendary lore of oriental peoples 
generally, had never read the New Testament or 
known till this day that the narratives it contains 
existed. Let us picture to ourselves, I say, such a 
youth discovering accidentally a copy of the New 
Testament and proceding to read it through without 
assistance from any one who professed to be an 
interpreter of it. He would soon perceive that these 
writings, as I have just said, concern themselves 
principally with two tasks, namely, the story of the 
career of Jesus of Nazareth and an explanation of 
the meaning of his presence and place in the world. 
He would first proceed, I think, to evaluate these 
accounts in terms of his appreciation of truly his- 
torical facts and their place in the making of our 
present lives. We can surmise without much diffi- 
culty some of the thoughts this intellectually keen, 
heathen young man would be likely to have. 

It is pretty certain that his attention would first be 
attracted to the extraordinary occurrences recorded 
and that he would detect resemblances between them 
and the extraordinary events associated in the minds 
of people with the beginnings of other faiths. Also, 
there can be little doubt that a reader with his mental 
tendencies would regard such accounts as the virgin 
birth of Jesus, the visions and dreams associated 



58 Creative Christianity 

with it, his feeding of thousands of people at a single 
time from a few barley cakes, his walking on the 
water of the lake to go aboard a boat and rejoin 
his disciples, his producing a calm in the midst of 
the storm by commanding the waves and winds to 
be quiet, his raising of the dead back to life by the 
utterance of a word — there can be little doubt, I say, 
in the minds of those who are familiar with the 
effect of thoroughly scientific training upon the 
minds of men in our day, that this hypothetical youth 
would class these portions of the narratives with 
the folklore, legends or mythology he had already 
found in the traditions of other religious faiths or 
had read in their scriptures. If he also finds that 
similar things are recorded of the followers of Jesus 
for a time and are referred to his action through 
them, will he not suppose that the one body of narra- 
tives is as likely to prove legendary as the other? 
And if this young scholar finds that those books 
of the New Testament in which there is little narra- 
tive or none at all nevertheless assume on the part 
of Jesus and his followers the possession of similar 
or greater powers than those mentioned in the narra- 
tives and that the names and powers which other 
religions attached to the objects of their worship 
correspond to those which are here connected with 
the name of Jesus as descriptions of his dignity, will 
he not conclude that this attitude of mind is charac- 
teristic of the New Testament as a whole? It does 
not follow that he would entertain any disrespect 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 59 

toward these works on this account, for if he were 
religiously disposed as well as scientifically trained 
he might feel that human faith is so mighty a thing 
that it is unable to express itself adequately without 
resort to some such modes of utterance as these and 
in consequence he might view their representations 
as symbols of faith rather than records of external 
fact. 

There is another series of impressions this young 
man would receive from the reading of these little 
books. He would find that in all these writings of 
the New Testament — whether narrative, epistolary 
or discursive — mingled with the features mentioned 
as so foreign to our customary modes of thinking, 
there are utterances of the sincerest and profoundest, 
most stimulating and most comforting devotion. He 
would find that with the sternest moral judgments 
upon human action there is united the tenderest in- 
terest in the happiness of men and evidence of the 
most unselfish effort to come to the hearts of the 
poor, the homeless, the friendless, the ignorant and 
the erring with the help they need. He would find 
in the writers a serene confidence that they who share 
these things are the destined leaders of mankind and 
the heirs of a perfect blessedness in a world to come. 
He would find also in them the spirit of the noblest 
self-sacrifice and a courage that shrank not from 
pain or death for the sake of their faith. I am 
sure that our young man would find his heart touched 
by these things and yearning at times for an inner 



60 Creative Christianity 

acquaintance with some of the experiences set forth 
in these writings at the same time that he regarded 
some of the things related there as legendary and 
their hold on the minds of men as temporary. 

There is a further step. This reader would per- 
ceive that those fine and high qualities of soul 
that stir him so deeply are as closely associated with 
the name of Jesus in the minds of the writers as 
are the narratives some of whose features seem in- 
credible as matters of fact. The question, "How 
came it to be so?" would force itself on his mind and 
demand an answer. The hope of discovering the 
answer would compel him to examine with the ut- 
most thoroughness open to him the whole situation 
out of which these writings came, in order to find 
out how it was they ever came into existence at all. 
I believe that if he were a young man of sincere 
purpose and balanced judgment he would rise from 
his study with the firm and overwhelming convic- 
tion that, if there is to be any explanation at all of 
the narratives, it must point to a real human per- 
sonality who lived among those people and impressed 
himself so powerfully on their minds that they could 
find no better way of telling what he had done for 
them and what they expected in consequence than 
by setting forth the force of his action and presence 
among them in terms of those deeds and powers 
that were customarily ascribed to beings of a divine 
order. The thing they did would be quite unnatural 
for men with our training but was perfectly natural 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 61 

to men of their habits of thought and speech. 

We may be pretty sure that such a student as I 
have spoken of would not be content to allow his 
interest in the accounts he found in the New Testa- 
ment to drop away at this point. He would find 
in the situation an invitation to undertake the task 
at the very outset of acquiring a clear knowledge of 
the matters of fact that may be conceived as basic 
to everything else. He would become one of the 
large number of critical scholars who have sought 
by the most effective application of established meth- 
ods of historical research to distinguish the "objec- 
tive facts" of Jesus' career from those elements of 
the narratives which are due to the religious faith 
and fervor, the personal hopes and expectations, 
the inventive and constructive imagination of his 
followers. The outcome of the efforts that have been 
made in this direction are now fairly familiar to us 
all. The attempt to exhibit before us the actual 
Jesus as he was in himself, by eliminating those 
features which a native, popular pictorial art threw 
about him, by removing the oriental drapery from 
his figure has been, on the whole, disappointing. Of 
this the prolific crop of modern "lives" of Jesus is 
very convincing evidence. 

In the case of the investigations that proceeded on 
the assumption that the contents of the narratives 
could be taken at their face value as eye-witnesses' 
accounts of facts and that the four main narratives 
could be construed by a process of harmonization 



62 Creative Christianity 

into a single consistent narrative it has become 
plain that apparent inconsistencies cannot be removed 
without violence. Where, without insisting on the 
harmony, it has been tried to write a broadly reliable 
"life" of Jesus it has become evident that the original 
narrators did not have this distinctly in mind and 
that the materials necessary are inadequately sup- 
plied. Where the presence of interpretative elements 
in the narratives has been clearly recognized and it 
has been sought to remove these in order to retain 
only the plainly certified facts, the resultant story 
is destitute of the inspiring faith that makes the 
biblical narratives such a mighty power in the world 
and becomes as well suited to weaken faith as to 
arouse it. The resultant figure of Jesus, when a 
purely scientific criticism has offered its product to 
us, is so clearly modernized that one is led to wonder 
how the commonplace figure that is left in place of 
the Jesus pictured in the Gospels could ever be 
expected to arouse in anybody the warm-hearted 
and conquering faith which those early Christians 
undoubtedly possessed. We have seen already that 
no relief can be found by seeking to retain his teach- 
ings rather than his personality because, in the first 
place, it cannot be done with assurance and, in the 
second place, because they obtain their meaning 
mostly from the character of him who gave them. 
With him left out, they tend to sink to the level of 
commonplaces. 

Summarily, then, as to this point: We must 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 63 

say that we have not in the New Testament a simple 
matter-of-fact statement of what Jesus said and did, 
and the more we try to make it appear so, the more 
evident is our failure. We have no clear right to 
claim possession of a verbatim report of his teach- 
ings or anything like it. True, there is in many 
places a marked originality in appearance, betokening 
the influence of a powerful personality. His stamp 
in a general way is on them. It is quite possible 
that there are instances, few or many, of exact 
quotations from his lips and in many passages there 
is a verisimilitude that inclines us to say, "This is 
Jesus' own utterance and no one else's." But we 
can never be quite sure that the verisimilitude is not 
owing to the fitness of such sayings to the state of 
mind those people had come to or to our own state of 
mind. What we are sure of is, their attitude toward 
him. We are sure that what they ascribed to him 
by way of word or deed was what they believed he 
had said or done or must have said or done under 
the circumstances described. Or there were circum- 
stances of their own that demanded a word from 
him to sustain their hearts or a picture of his doings 
that would fire them with faith and courage. The 
undertaking to separate his real words and deeds 
from what they ascribed to him is a very precarious 
one and often clearly impossible of execution. It can 
never supply a sure basis for faith. It is my firm 
conviction that what we do possess is of vastly 
greater account. Instead of an irreducible residuum 



64 Creative Christianity 

of facts and sayings standing by themselves as the 
foundation of a superstructure of a modern faith 
we have an impressive picture of Jesus as he wrote 
himself down in the hearts of men around him. 
And it was done in such a way that the image of 
his person could never be deleted but went on re- 
peating itself with ever growing force from genera- 
tion to generation. His inward life and career and 
theirs became for ever inseparable. 

Hence the New Testament representations of the 
character and career of Jesus are at the same time 
a genuine transcript of their own. In the midst of 
the varied and often trying experiences through 
which they were passing as they sought to sustain 
their strength against the attacks to which they were 
constantly subjected or to advance it among the 
people with whom they mingled their inspiration and 
their comfort came from the memory of the days 
of his presence with them. All — words and deeds 
and sufferings of his — were transfigured in their 
meaning because these men were sharers of his ex- 
periences and bearers of his cross. This is what we 
find in the Gospels as well as in the other writings. 
The evangelists' renderings of his teachings reflect 
their ou n as well. Their pictures of his career reflect 
the character of theirs. The sayings they attributed 
to him were the things they also said to one another 
as they communed together of their faith; the mes- 
sages they attributed to him when he spoke to the 
people were the messages they were constantly giving 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 65 

to other men; his sermons were their sermons, his 
parables their parables, his diatribes against the 
Pharisees and other perverters of the truth were 
the polemic they were accustomed to deliver against 
their Jewish opponents; and the promises they 
ascribed to him as he spoke to the sorrowing, the 
tempted and the sinning, were the promises they were 
accustomed to offer to people in those circumstances. 
Everywhere the two are so closely melted together 
that the attempt to separate them becomes more or 
less arbitrary. What these men did in this regard 
seemed perfectly natural at the time and it was quite 
in keeping with the literary customs of the age. 

Are we, then, the worse off because the separa- 
tion cannot be made? Far from it! The impossi- 
bility of making a clear distinction between the 
things that Jesus said and did, on the one hand, and 
the things his disciples conceived he must have said 
and done, on the other hand, so far from being a 
disadvantage to the Christian faith, turns out to be, 
on the contrary, a gain. For, in the first place, a 
knowledge of what he was in himself, apart from 
his place in the hearts of his followers and the glow- 
ing utterances in their spontaneous confessions of 
his worth to them, would yield us little more than 
an unfeeling and dumb skeleton of One whose des- 
tiny was to be alive forevermore. We can have 
little interest in him or in any one else apart from 
the impression he made on men at the time and after- 
wards. And yet this knowledge of what Jesus was 



66 Creative Christianity 

in himself is just what the authoritative creeds and 
confessions of faith have professed to furnish. Nat- 
urally enough, these professions lead to doubt and 
un faith toward that which is offered as the object 
of faith. What, indeed, is any person or individual 
detached from those relations of fellowship with 
other persons in whose midst he lives? A doctrine 
of the person of Christ which aims at setting him 
by himself as a self-contained individual apart from 
the life he created in others by his fellowship with 
them yields us only a phantasm that bewilders and 
confounds us. And, in the next place, the safest 
index we can find to the true worth of any one lies 
not in the manner in which he stands distinct and soli- 
tary, complete in himself independently of that which 
he finds for himself in others, but it lies in the very 
attitude toward himself which he creates in others' 
minds, so that their character and his have become 
inseparable through the manner in which he has 
written himself down in them. The greatest trib- 
ute to be offered to the worth of any personality is 
to be discovered in the transformation he has 
wrought in others. This transformation in them 
is always reflected back upon the image they retain 
of him as its source. Paradoxical though it may 
seem, it is of more consequence for us to discover 
what Jesus' followers believed he said and did than 
to know exactly what he said and did apart from 
their belief. 

We may say, therefore, that many of the marvels 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 67 

which these men accredited to Jesus as his achieve- 
ments may turn out to be of much less significance 
and importance to us than something else of which 
they give little more than hints or to which — if we 
except in part the fourth Gospel — they refer rarely. 
Greater than his healings of the sick by a touch or 
by a word, his feeding of hungry multitudes by a 
miraculous multiplication of loaves, his restoration 
of dead men to life; greater than his sayings and 
discourses — nay, greater than his very example of 
"the creed of creeds in loveliness of perfect deeds/' 
is the faith in him which he created in the hearts 
of his disciples. The others passed a long time 
ago. If such as these were our chief inheritance 
from him, the more remote they become in time, the 
less effective must they become as directive of our 
lives or standards of our conduct. We might go 
further and say that under these conditions the fur- 
ther back from him we stand in time, the less en- 
couragement his career would give to us. For he 
would be left standing out as a solitary form on a 
distant horizon, or a sudden and brief interpolation 
of a higher existence into the lower plane of ours, 
and the long and fruitless waiting for his return 
would issue in a loss of the hope he temporarily 
aroused in our hearts and, perchance, a growing bit- 
terness would come in its stead. It is surely of 
great significance that, instead of this, the confidence 
of men in his worth has grown from generation to 
generation and never did the reverence for him or 



68 Creative Christianity 

the sense of his indispensability appear greater than 
today. 

Undoubtedly the distinctive thing about the New 
Testament is the effort of the writers to delineate 
the personality of Jesus. Dismissing from our 
thought the prospect of showing that the picture is 
scientifically verifiable or even absolutely trust- 
worthy as a record of observable fact, we see that 
these writings were produced in the interest of faith 
and that the features of their dominating figure are 
a transcript of faith. The measure of their success 
here is their great achievement. For they have suc- 
ceeded in constructing the portrait of a human figure 
that has seemed to countless multitudes and scores 
of generations of men the answer of God to their 
longings for the vision of a personal state that will 
satisfy their deepest and purest aspirations. How 
did those people become possessed of this unparal- 
leled power? For it seems at the first glance, at 
least, that it is one thing for such a personality to 
appear in the world and quite another thing for 
men to apprehend and appreciate him. Which of the 
prophets did not the fathers kill? Which of them 
do not the fathers still persist in killing? On the 
other hand, however, how can we say that the man 
is perfect who does not succeed in arousing in the 
minds of those who have the best means of knowing 
him the awareness of his perfection? Our first 
answer to the question as to the source of the por- 
trait of Jesus in the New Testament must be, of 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 69 

course, that it is to be found in the actual presence 
among men of the all-subduing, all-inspiring per- 
sonality of Jesus who awakened them to the con- 
sciousness of an ideal that was so intimately united 
with his actual life that it must, perforce, forever 
after bear his name. But one would like to know 
how much of the picture was derived from their 
spiritual inheritance prior to his coming, how much 
was due to their own endeavors apart from their 
actual contact with him, and how much they owed 
distinctively to his own active impression upon them. 
To questions such as these there can be, in the 
very nature of the case, no decisive answer. The 
unity of the inner life of these people can be as little 
divided into separate sections as can the inner life 
of any one of us today. It may be true that no man's 
inner life is a perfect unity. It may be that analysis 
can disclose various factors constitutive of any man's 
character, but in any case the analysis proceeds tenta- 
tively and the outcome is of uncertain value. No 
man's spiritual nature is a composite. The spiritual 
inheritance of these people, the contribution which 
Jesus made to their inner life by his personal con- 
tact with them and the natural fruitage of their 
own spontaneous spiritual activities were all fused in 
one and made forever inseparable. So that, para- 
doxical again as it may seem, while we must say 
that Jesus imparted to them the power to work their 
great achievement of giving to the world the image 
of their divine Lord, that he summoned forth in 



70 Creative Christianity 

them the latent energies that carried their faith and 
their longing upward to God (and these energies, 
but for him, so far as we can tell, would else have 
lain forever dormant and dead), and that he 
gave himself to them in the plenitude of his soul- 
penetrating power; at the same time we must 
say that it was they who made it possible for 
him to come to the rest of mankind in the 
way he has been doing. Whether or no there 
be in all men the same inherent ability which 
they showed, it is plain that it was these people 
who brought into action the deep spiritual discern- 
ment that fitted them to make the discovery of his 
worth to mankind. It was they who gave him to 
the world. And they did it, not by a sort of photo- 
graphic process which leaves the personal originality 
and creative power of the artist out of the picture; 
nor by a sort of short-hand preservation of his words 
which would exclude the interpretative genius of 
the reporter and leave us only a fixed law that "kills," 
and cannot "make alive" ; but they did it by filling 
the portrait with the whole wealth of their spiritual 
nature. In the figure of Jesus which has been trans- 
mitted to the later Christian generations he and they 
are for ever joined in one. They succeeded in con- 
ceiving the image of a personality that they believed 
would conquer the world, and the course of history 
has been a progressive confirmation of their faith. 
He succeeded in imparting to them the inspira- 
tion to this achievement with such impressive force 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 71 

that the Perfect One that floated into their mind and 
out again into the great sea of human life was, so 
far as they could tell, just Jesus as he was in himself. 
And were they not right ? In any instance to which 
we can point, the real man, the true man, is not 
some hypothetical figure standing by himself apart 
but the man whose inmost soul is reflected in the 
souls of others. 

It seems, then, that when we talk of these spiritual 
possessions or achievements of men we are exposing 
ourselves to the charge of the purely formal logician 
that we are arguing in a circle. So it may be. Per- 
chance we cannot escape the charge. Perchance 
there is no need that we should. If the laws of 
formal logic are fixed, the standard of personal 
character is not. The personal character that is 
fixed loses in us its personality. The discovery of 
the perfect personality is gradual. 

There can be no reasonable doubt that the early 
Christians as a body regarded Jesus as morally per- 
fect or sinless, that is, when the question arose in 
their minds with such force as to demand an answer. 
To be sure, the distinct affirmation of it is very rare. 
At best there are only three or four places, found in 
certain of the more reflective portions of the New 
Testament, where the assertion is made, and there 
it is only partially explicit. It is not possible for us 
in the present connection to undertake a discussion 
of the separate passages where such statements are 
made. It is enough to point out that they indicate 



72 Creative Christianity 

that, as the theoretical interpretation of the faith 
progressed, the question was sure to arise. The man- 
ner of its treatment would depend much on the con- 
ception of sin which obtained among the people to 
whom the writings referred. Far more signifi- 
cant than any number of direct assertions of his im- 
maculateness of character is the implication conveyed 
by the entire attitude of Christians toward his name. 
It showed implicit confidence, absolute trust, unques- 
tioning loyalty to the meaning of all he said and did 
as they understood it. They had found in him what 
they had longed for and what, as they believed, the 
whole world needed. 

I feel, however, that the very raising of the 
theoretical question of Jesus' sinlessness tends to 
divert attention from the governing interest of these 
writings — and for that matter, from the governing 
interest of true religious faith anywhere. The su- 
preme interests of life are the practical. The 
theoretical are quite subsidiary and must not be al- 
lowed to dominate the life of a believer. Our New 
Testament books were not, to any appreciable degree, 
produced by philosophical idealists who were trying 
to present in reasoned form a character that would 
satisfy permanently the longings of men for a con- 
crete ideal — even though one might say they accom- 
plished it. They and their readers belonged to the 
class that were and still are immersed in cares and 
anxieties, sins and sorrows of many kinds and most 
of them of a very concrete sort. The only kind of 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 73 

perfection they cared about, after all, in any one 
for whom their allegiance might be claimed was his 
perfect ability to save them. Their regard for Jesus 
was not the wondering admiration of some abstractly 
perfect character, such as recluses of old or senti- 
mentalists of our time might dream of. Nor was 
it a sublime approval of the sentiments he was said 
to be continually expressing. This would mean 
little more than to say that he pleased them because 
he was so much like themselves as they pictured them- 
selves at their best. 

The important thing about these books is not the 
belief or theory of the writers that one had appeared 
among them as the solitary instance of pure goodness 
in the world. This would be, as we have seen, no 
sufficient basis of a gospel for all mankind but might 
turn out to be almost the very opposite. Such an 
one might be the despair of men rather than their 
hope. In fact the very treatment of such a question 
even now tends to become a matter of purely aca- 
demic interest and to divert attention from the real 
issues when men are seeking the better life. The 
discussion of it must turn out to be indecisive and 
fruitless. For the judgment one may reach on this 
question discloses most of all one's own subjective 
standard or, at best, the conventional standard of 
his time and place. In the end, the only one who is 
fully competent to reach a decision on such a case 
is he who is himself both sinless and omniscient. 
We, poor mortals, in our ignorance and sin must 



74 Creative Christianity 

proceed on a different basis. The early Christians, 
I repeat, were not thinking of such an individual 
as we in academic fashion are pleased to call the 
ideal of humanity but they were people to whose 
minds the sense of need was ever present and the 
one test they thought of applying to Jesus or any 
one who might offer to help them was his competence 
to cope with the ills they dreaded or were suffering 
from at the time. The Gospels everywhere reflect 
these conditions. Subjection to the authority of 
the foreigner and the terror of his power; the despot- 
ism of a home-grown ecclesiastical hierarchy; the 
anarchical reaction against both; the prevalence of 
poverty, hunger, disease and helplessness; the long- 
ing and expectancy for the advent of an Inbringer 
of deliverance — these are everywhere. The recital 
of his words and deeds correspond to these needs. 
How marvellously rich they are in inspiration and 
comfort I need not stay to try to tell. The Gospels 
and the other writings teem with assurance that he 
brought to them a supremacy over all evil forces, 
even over death itself. Had not he himself gone 
down to death at the hands of their foes and his ! 
But his resurrection turned its horror into glory. 
They too would conquer. Thus no collection and 
organization of his teachings, however valuable it 
might prove as material for a biblical theology, and 
no presentation of the particular things he did, as 
supposedly an example for us, can ever reflect ade- 
quately the power of the Christian faith. The force 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 75 

of the appeal that any or all of these can make today 
lies in their universalistic character. It is only as 
they disclose to us the answer to our needs at this 
our own time and place that we can see in the face 
of him from whom they were affirmed to have come 
the lineaments of a perfect personality. And this, 
I must add, requires much more than a reproduction 
of their quality of piety in our hearts. It requires 
a piety as much deeper and broader than theirs as 
the sweep of human life in our age and the strenuous- 
ness of its demands exceed theirs. 

Naturally, therefore, the representations which the 
New Testament writers make of the personality of 
Jesus must be used with discrimination. The ac- 
counts of such scenes as his exorcism of demons, 
his transfiguration on a mountain top, his stilling of 
storms, his summoning of deceased persons back to 
life, his physical ascension into the sky before the 
eyes of men, picture him as exercising a kind of 
magical power and as having access to influences of 
a kind extraneous to our lives. To men of that time 
these might seem evidences of his high calling but 
they make him in a corresponding degree a stranger 
and an alien to us. In all this our minds are drawn 
to the region of the mysterious, the unaccountable, 
the unknowable. With a personality whose native 
abode is there we can never be at home. Not only 
are we unable to do such things as these but we do 
not desire to do them. The supplementation of one's 
native powers in this externalistic fashion suggests 



76 Creative Christianity 

to us the imperfect recognition of the worth of per- 
sonality. These representations of the relation of 
man to the universe pertain to the stage of human 
progress in which the benumbing fear of cosmic and 
extra-cosmic forces, of impersonal or half -personal 
spirit, of demonic powers, bad or good, was still 
exercising a powerful control over the thought and 
actions of men. In all this we see lingering in the 
minds of these early Christians the old oriental dread 
of, and subjection to the power of the non-personal 
cosmos. We feel now that if such representations 
as these were inseparable from his real character he 
would be separated from us in the deepest meaning 
of his nature and we should find the prospect of a 
perfect affiliation with him far removed from us. In 
this case, too, human salvation is conceived in rela- 
tion to existences strange to us and must always have 
a character somewhat alien to the growing self- 
consciousness of men. We know of no means by 
which we can be carried into that unknown realm 
nor do our longings reach out in that direction. 
Therefore we are unable to see in the representa- 
tions we have just spoken of the perfection of 
personality, but rather its disparagement. 

But how different from these are the impressions 
made on our minds by the recital of the Master's 
inner attitude toward the poor, the sick and the 
repentant! How contrasted with the emotions we 
experience when we read the story of lus soul's 
life in the journey to the cross on which he was to 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 77 

die! The reality of the inward strain experienced 
in Gethsemane, his magnanimity toward those who 
came to arrest him, his calm dignity before his 
judges, his pity and his prayer for those who were 
killing him, his self-commitment to God at the end — 
how natural it all seems in one who had lived as He ! 
Efforts to make of these things a part of a pre- 
arranged plan of salvation are only offensive now. 
For these deeds of his bring him near to us in our 
hours of struggle to do and endure to the end and 
they appeal to our desire to raise our manhood to 
a higher level of worth. Jesus' endurance of death, 
the grandeur of his self-affirmation in its presence, 
his power over men's hearts afterwards produce in 
our hearts the certainty of conquest over death in 
the entire depth of its meaning. That is the heart 
of the Christian faith always. 

As the growing knowledge and religious experi- 
ence of the Christian people during these eighteen 
centuries and more of their history have issued in 
a state of mind that calls for a discriminating use 
of the narrative materials of the New Testament, 
it also calls for a similar discrimination in the treat- 
ment of the epistolary, discursive and predictive por- 
tions. Paul, for example, finds the experience "when 
it pleased God," as he says, "to reveal his Son in 
me," the focal point of interest in the outcome of 
Jesus' career. He finds his own life's purpose deter- 
mined for him in the great act of Jesus' self-giving 
on the cross: "I have been crucified with Christ; 



78 Creative Christianity 

and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in 
me; and the life which I now five in the flesh I live 
in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who 
loved me and gave himself up for me." We find him 
revolutionizing the popular view of the gift of the 
Spirit by setting the extranaturalistic reference at 
the periphery of the Christian faith and practically 
nullifying these miraculous gifts or, at least, placing 
the idea of the charismata at the periphery of the 
Christian life. Instead, he internalized and ethicised 
the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit by which the 
Christian man lives and walks is the principle of 
the higher life as against the ''flesh," the principle 
of the lower life. That is, the impartation of the 
spirit is a bestowment of moral power and the fruits 
are moral — love, joy, peace, long suffering, goodness 
and the like. Our personality is enhanced thereby, 
for the very mind of Christ is in us. Christ himself 
becomes identical with the indwelling Spirit which 
is reproducing in the Christian the action of the 
principle of vicariousness that was the mind of 
Christ, "who for our sakes humbled himself unto 
death." "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and 
death." "We have died with Christ and have been 
made alive again in him." What is the value of 
those external bestowments of an absent Christ re- 
ferred to in such phenomena as the gift of tongues 
compared with the tremendous moral power of the 
faith in his inward presence ? Jesus is not made any 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 79 

longer a figure of the past standing isolated in his 
peculiar individuality and destined to be a fading 
figure as the ages grow, but his personality has 
entered into ours transfusing it and ever fulfilling 
itself more perfectly in ours. The subjective ex- 
perience of the transforming power of a personality 
who gives himself unreservedly for others has trans- 
fused the historic figure and made it everlastingly 
present as the very self of our self. 

But when, in contrast, Paul turns his passionate 
portrayal of the Chri stain's inner striving for the 
better life into terms of a cosmic movement the 
impression it makes on our minds today is of a 
very different kind from the foregoing. The inter- 
cession of the Spirit on our behalf, the groanings 
for betterment which we experience within ourselves 
seem to be represented as moments in the movement 
of a universe that "groans and travails in pain to- 
gether until now." If our personal strivings are 
to be explained as significant of the universal strife 
of cosmic forces, then personality seems to fall into 
a plane of existence lower than the cosmos, to be of 
subordinate worth, and to be destined to dissolution. 
When, again, in the epistle to the Colossians he 
places Jesus at the head of those semi-personal or 
impersonal energies which the Gnostics commonly 
represented as the causes of cosmic changes — thrones, 
dominions, principalities, powers — Jesus is once 
more removed far from us. He has passed into 
the realm where the personal and the non-personal 



80 Creative Christianity 

are fused and our hope of rising to personal perfec- 
tion by normal and native processes of our spirits 
lies prostrate. 

The higher Pauline view of the relation of the 
personality of the Christ to the Spirit is hinted at 
in the Synoptic Gospels but dominates the Johannine 
image of Jesus. His work is represented as not 
possibly completed in the earthly career of an in- 
dividual but as perpetuated and progressively per- 
fected in the growing inner life of his disciples. 
There can be little doubt that the aim of the writer 
was to substitute this for the apocalypses that the 
Synoptists use when they set forth the future work 
of Jesus in terms of vast and appalling cosmic changes. 
"I will not leave you orphans; I come to you. . . . 
Because I live ye shall live also. ... If a man 
love me he will keep my words; and my father will 
love him ; and we will come unto him and make our 
abode with him. ... I will love him and will 
manifest myself to him. ... I have many things 
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. 
Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he 
will guide you into all the truth. . . . He shall 
take of mine and shall declare it unto you." At 
this point the climax of the new self-consciousness 
of those early followers of Jesus is reached. Their 
deeper sense of personal worth was lifting them out 
of the evil world around them. They had found the 
perfect personality and in the discovery of him they 
had found their own personality as well. Life had 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 81 

now a new meaning to them. It could no longer 
be described in terms of what they had been — for 
their sins were forgiven, forthgiven, detached from 
them as not exhibiting their true selfhood — but its 
true worth could be described only in terms of what 
they were yet to be. "The revealing of the sons of 
God," which Paul had spoken of, should take place 
when they should "be like him and see him as he is." 
How natural it was that to such a writer the per- 
fection of the personality of Christ could not be 
disclosed until he had reached his self- fulfillment 
through the achievement of giving himself in su- 
preme self-sacrifice to their very souls. And at the 
same time it is seen that the discovery of the higher 
personality and one's self -attainment to it are not 
successive events but one event. Each is implicated 
in the other. 

But while in these later Johannine writings there 
are still traces of those features of the earlier pic- 
tures of the Apocalypse which describe Jesus' per- 
sonality in terms which subject its activity to the 
intervention of supernatural cosmic forces, yet 
the prevailing meaning is plain. There is to be 
no violence offered to our personality in the redemp- 
tive process. I am never so consciously self-govern- 
ing and self -determining in my action as when I find 
myself attracted and subdued by the higher person- 
ality. Then alone can I be my true self, the man I 
was meant to be. In the end that personality alone 
can attract my affections, retain my confidence and 



82 Creative Christianity 

control my will, who enables me to be aware of my 
true self, my better self, the man I am to be. He 
enables me to construe the purpose of my life in 
terms of that which I see in him. He has become 
my Lord, not in the sense that he can dictate for 
me the direction in w r hich I must go, for that would 
deprive me of that inner force without which I can- 
not be truly personal, but in the sense that he projects 
his selfhood into mine and effectuates in my spirit 
the activities of his own. Every person does this 
in some degree and without it our lives could never 
have the unity of purpose that they do have with 
one another. And when I find one in whom I see 
that which can only fulfill and not destroy my true 
selfhood, my attachment to him becomes the indis- 
pensable condition of my perfection. It is this 
interpretation of the significance of the career of 
Jesus which is to us the most impressive of all the 
aspects of him presented to us. It is the heart of 
that which we are accustomed to call "the atone- 
ment." 

We have seen that already before our New Test- 
ament was completed the Christian Gospel was pass- 
ing rapidly out from the moral and religious at- 
mosphere of Judaism into the broad spaces of the 
Graeco-Roman world. There it made its appeal 
to the most deeply religious spirits among the mixed 
populations thrown together by the Roman conquests 
under one supreme authority. The Christian teachers 
found themselves confronted with the serious prob- 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 83 

lem of interpreting their message to that mystical 
and speculative spirit which the western Aryans had 
brought with them from their ancestral abodes in 
the East. It is true that these western Aryans had 
not gone as far in the direction of depersonalizing 
and denaturing existance as did the Brahmanic phil- 
osophy that ruled the East. Yet, under the guiding 
hand of Plato, a hierarchy of ideas had displaced the 
family of concrete deities that reigned over the world 
and men, according to the ancient Grecian mythol- 
ogy, and the supreme deity had been turned into 
the Supreme Idea, the all-inclusive metaphysical 
good. The New Platonic philosophy which arose 
about the beginning of the Christian era and had 
its chief centre of influence in Alexandria, sought 
to mediate salvation to the broken and oppressed 
peoples of the Graeco-Roman world by imparting 
to them a divinely bestowed enlightenment. Receiv- 
ing this enlightenment the human spirit would rise 
from materiality, grossness, error, corruption and 
death to the region of light and life from which it 
had supposedly fallen. It was a philosophy of 
ledemption and seemed to accord with the Christian 
n essage of redemption by a Christ who had de- 
scended from heaven to earth in order to raise men 
up to heaven with him. Such a message appealed 
powerfully to the conquered peoples whose religions 
were now compulsorily practiced in secret. For in 
their 'mysteries" they had sought to come into 
union of nature with their deities. 



84 Creative Christianity 

When "J esus an d the ressurrection" was preached 
to the votaries of these faiths and to the advocates 
of the philosophy that was akin to them, he displaced 
in their minds their ancient deities, but it was at the 
cost of being conceived in their likeness and his 
salvation in terms of the kind of redemption which 
their worshippers craved. His death and resurrection 
were made the death and resurrection of a God and 
by him they were to be redeemed from the bondage 
of darkness, error and metaphysical corruption and 
to enter into the incorruptible, immortal life of 
deity. 

This is at bottom the theory that underlies the 
Nicene Creed and the later Catholic creeds. The 
crucial point in them is the matter of his being of 
the divine nature or essence, on the one hand, so 
as to be able to redeem — and of human nature, on 
the other hand, so that it might be redeemed. Thus 
in the minds of those converts from the ethnic 
faiths his distinctive personality was left obscured 
and was subordinated in importance to the divine 
nature. Correspondingly, the distinct, individual per- 
sonality of those who became subjects of his divine 
power was submerged in the human nature which was 
to be redeemed. In this way the whole work of re- 
demption was represented as the incarnation of the 
divine nature, in order that human nature in us might 
be the recipient of it and become immortal. It is no 
wonder if we find that the men who were to be made 
the subjects of this transformation were in large 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 85 

measure denuded of the rights of personality, their 
power of initiative and self-affirmation denied, and 
themselves reduced to the necessity of becoming the 
passive subjects of an inscrutable change of nature 
and an inexplicable enlightenment through the admin- 
istration of mysteries (sacraments) in priestly hands. 
Not perfect personality but perfect nature is the ideal 
held before the eyes of men by this theory. 

But, even so, the vision of the Perfect Personality 
persisted and in course of time reaffirmed its domin- 
ion over the human heart. Not even a complicated 
heirarchical system and its organized sacramentalism 
could conceal from view the mighty One that had won 
his way into human hearts and was really compelling 
a reconstruction of their whole view of the world. 
The creeds that substituted a nature or essence for 
a personality could not obliterate the loving memory 
which the still continued tradition of Jesus and his 
estimate of men preserved in action. And, accord- 
ingly, the theologians were greater than their creed 
and the members of the Catholic Church were 
greater than their church. 

This is the more manifest when we pass from the 
Graeco-Roman world and the Greek Catholic Church 
to the mediaeval Roman Empire and the mediaeval 
Roman Church. The Clugniac Revival, the Cru- 
sades, and the meditations of the mediaeval mystics 
testify to the manner in which he was reasserting 
his right over men's hearts. The individual human 
personality came in for the recognition of his pre- 



86 Creative Christianity 

rogative. The elaborate penitential system that 
was developed in the hope of keeping him in subjec- 
tion testified to the manner in which the Christian 
faith was elevating his sense of selfhood above the 
whole church system. Salvation was becoming 
consciously not a matter of "nature" but an ideal 
for the man. The system that arose out of a meta- 
physical conception of salvation began to break in 
pieces. Men who were reading the New Testament 
— and their number grew mightily — followed Jesus 
in his ministry to the needy, walked with him the 
way to the cross, sought in their Gethsemane to find 
fellowship with him, the Tempted One, conceived a 
personal nearness to him and a personal likeness to 
him to be dearer than all else. Monks and nuns 
found in him a brother and bridegroom to their 
souls. He was to them the Chief Celibate, in whom 
the grace of renunciation was supremely exhibited. 
Their aim was to reproduce in their souls and bodies 
the experiences through which he had passed and in 
going the way of the cross with him they were, they 
believed, in real fellowship with him. Of more im- 
portance to us is the fact that multitudes of the 
Bible-reading laity, as they caught the image of 
Jesus set forth in the Gospels, drew away from the 
hierarchical and sacramental system in which they 
had been in bondage and conceived in likeness to him 
a consciousness of independence that shocked and 
startled the church authorities and drove them to 
make the vain attempt to extinguish the new light 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 87 

that had come with the sight of him into the souls 
of men. The whole issue resolved itself into a 
struggle between the power of an organization of sup- 
posed supernatural forces, on the one hand, and the 
power of the new estimate of personal worth that 
had come to men's hearts, on the other hand. The 
fires of the Roman Inquisition proved impotent to 
destroy finally the latter. It became the soul of the 
Protestant religious Reformation. 

The Reformation signalized the advent of this 
new type of self-consciousness in western Europe. 
The sense of immediate relationship with God rose 
to dominance in the Protestant heart. God's abso- 
lute sovereignty in the inner and outer life of the 
individual and the eternal significance of the individ- 
ual came to expression in the doctrines of election 
and predestination of each to his final destiny. The 
absolute sufficiency of the atonement wrought by 
Christ and its appropriation by the individual through 
immediate faith in him guaranteed the man's safety 
with or without sacraments. The absolute perfection 
of the regenerating work of the Spirit of God who 
attested himself by the "secret testimony" given 
immediately to the soul of the believer identified the 
final word of God with the highest action of the 
human spirit. All this, and much more of the same 
quality, seemed at the time to show that personality 
had come to true self -recognition at last. But such 
was really far from being the case. The accepted 
conception of the personality of Jesus furnishes the 



88 Creative Christianity 

clue to our judgment. In the orthodox representa- 
tions of him at the time we see the grandeur of one 
who possessed in himself in a real life on earth the 
infinite power and glory of God and who gave him- 
self, nevertheless, to the endurance of an infinite 
penalty for sin for the sake of men who were worth- 
less apart from the worth he thereby gave to them. 
But the interest in him personally is mostly limited 
to this one point. He is a being far superior to the 
world-fleeing Jesus of the mediaeval ascetic, but he 
is presented as an eternal divine personality whose 
native abode is in a different realm from ours and 
whose higher nature is an inscrutable mystery to 
us. His appropriation to himself of an impersonal 
human nature was in order that in it this divine per- 
son, whose nature is "impassible," might suffer re- 
demptively for men. His whole career is interpreted 
as furnishing evidence that it was so and his death 
was an event of an order that pertained exclusively 
to himself. The gulf between the essentially human 
and the essentially divine still remains fixed and never 
to be crossed by us. How artificial this entire con- 
struction seems to us now ! How we miss the human- 
ness of Jesus as he sought to fulfill the imperative 
of his own self -legislative potencies ("I must") and 
felt his way to perfection as we must do! We are 
excluded from a true fellowship with him in it all, 
for his life was metamorphosed into a pre-arranged 
program known in advance (through his divine om- 
niscience) to himself, which ours can never be. 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 89 

Moreover, we are left in ourselves without the crown 
of personality when we are made solely beneficiaries 
of his atonement and remain for ever excluded from 
the fellowship of his sufferings, since atonement is 
solely for us and never by us. And when we reach 
the doctrine of a double predestination and its con- 
sequences in an eternally dual destiny for mankind 
our personality suffers a violent diremption. For 
the supposition that we could be consenting parties 
to this predetermination of human personalities to 
an end so absolutely contrary to all the hopes that 
make our personality what it is, is to forget that our 
individual personality can never come to its perfec- 
tion except by a communion of inner life as wide as 
the race. 

But while it is evident that the doctrines and prac- 
tices of the early Protestants beclouded the character 
of perfect personality, it is also evident that the 
genius of the Reformation was to create in men's 
minds a powerful impulse in the direction of affirm- 
ing and vindicating the supremacy of personality 
over all systems and orders, whether political or 
ecclesiastical, intellectual or ethical, material or spirit- 
ual. Luther's doctrine that each man is justified 
through inward faith and that this faith contains in 
itself the whole truth of the Christian religion and 
Calvin's doctrine that each one is separately elected 
and foreordained to eternal life drew attention to 
the inner wealth and the independent worth of every 
man, though neither of these great leaders saw 



90 Creative Christianity 

this very clearly. The fruits were seen in the manner 
in which the individual Protestant began to assert his 
personal rights as against the system, no matter what 
it might be, in the midst of which he was born and 
whose sovereignty over him seemed inalienable. 
In the consciousness of his immediate relation with 
God the man became aware of his right and power to 
subjugate the system and make it tributary to the 
worth of the personality for whose sake it had been 
created — the very antithesis of the spirit that had 
come to reign in Catholicism. The story of the work- 
ing out of the premises of the principle would carry 
us far into many fields of human endeavor. The 
whole of the great fight for personal liberty, so 
thrilling to the student of modern history, is the story 
of the manner in which the self-affirmation in Jesus 
of Nazareth fructified the souls of men when they 
caught the new vision of him and enabled them to 
reiterate his self-affirmation in themselves. The 
rise and growth of religious Dissent in England and 
the demand for liberty of conscience portended, as 
some of its enemies saw, the coming of a storm in 
many realms of human life. When men felt that the 
perfection of their personality could come only in 
a communion of free persons like themselves and 
created the "free churches" in which they might hope 
for the realization of their hope, they paved the 
way for the remoulding of the forms of the political 
world in which they lived. The civil war in England, 
the American revolution and even the French rev- 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 91 

olution signalize the manner in which the sense of 
personal right and worth works its way to dominance 
when men fail to see that the only permanently toler- 
able form of government is that in which personal 
initiative has free play so that every personality may 
come to its true self under it. 

The great religious revivals of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries worked in the same direction, 
even when the subjects of those revivals failed to 
discern it. They were in inner sympathy with the 
great movement in psychology inaugurated by John 
Locke, where the whole body of human knowledge, 
so far from being given authoritatively from with- 
out, tends to be viewed as springing out of the native 
inner activity of the human soul. The great mis- 
sionary enterprise inaugurated by William Carey, 
the free-church man, was kindred in spirit for it 
showed that the reality of personal relation with God 
and the capacity of every human soul to share it 
were becoming the dominant conviction of a world- 
conquering Christianity. The tendency is to exalt 
personality above all church-systems and to regard 
them all as temporary and transitory inasmuch as 
they are purely tributary to personal worth. 

The same story is to be read in the transformation 
that is taking place in the jurisprudence and courts 
of justice of modern Christian countries, where 
justice is ceasing to be the infliction of a mere quid 
pro quo for injuries done (in the case of criminal 
law) and is coming to be dominated by the purpose 



92 Creative Christianity 

to realize the worth of every man, the criminal in- 
cluded. The tremendous sweep of the scientific 
movement has tended, on the whole, in the same di- 
rection. The scientific impulse of modern times 
springs mainly out of the confidence of our spirit 
that it is capable of compassing a true knowledge of 
the universe by its own inherent powers and of mak- 
ing the forces of the universe tributary to the pur- 
poses of a personal career. Thus the progress of 
science has worked powerfully toward the affirmation 
of the supreme worth of personality. In other 
words, the human personality finds that the mastery 
of the universe is involved in the realization of true 
selfhood. Our contention on this point is being con- 
firmed by the growing concentration of philosophic 
reflection on the meaning of personality. 

Reviewing our lengthy journey let us try to state 
in a few sentences the outcome of our study up to the 
present : 

The coming of Jesus Christ into the world is an 
historical movement ever progressively creative of 
a new experience and a correspondingly new estimate 
of the meaning and worth of a human life. By the 
insight men obtained into the significance of his 
career there grew up in the hearts of his followers a 
conviction of their superiority in the world and of 
the tributary relation of all things to the aim that 
had come to birth in their souls to be like him. 

It brought into existence a new and higher com- 
munion of men with men and created in them a mu- 



The Discovery of the Perfect Personality 93 

tual appreciation, so that each saw his own inner 
worth revealed in the others. In this new unity of 
life with one another they felt that they were the 
community destined to bring mankind to its final 
destiny in a perfect unity of life like their own. 

It introduced a new and higher appreciation of men 
universally. It discerned in the lowest the potential- 
ities of the perfect life and proceeded to refashion 
the life of mankind in all its ranges in accordance 
with the prophetic anticipation they had obtained of 
the future of the race. 

Men have been enabled to do this by virtue of the 
impact of the personality of Jesus Christ upon their 
minds as his personality has progressively disclosed 
itself in the creative activity of those who saw in 
him from the outset the embodiment of the highest 
and best hopes of the race. That is to say, in the 
sublime tragedy of his cross men have seen the 
power of a self -giving for all men which is the same 
as the affirmation of a right and power to rule them 
without limitation. In the subjection to such a rule 
as this men find their highest realization of liberty 
and power. In such a personality, ever fulfilling 
itself in us, we see the warrant for faith in the ex- 
istence of God, for this self -giving is surely the very 
godness of God. To believe in this Jesus Christ is 
to believe in God. 



CHAPTER III. 

LECTURE III. THE MAKING OF THE BETTER WORLD 

IF we may discover the motive power of the Chris- 
tian faith by a study of the writings that consti- 
tute our New Testament we may say that it 
lies in the union of two outstanding visions, namely, 
the vision of the Christ and the vision of the King- 
dom of God. In the former there appears the image 
of the Perfect Man and in the latter, the image of 
the Perfect World. The manner in which the Chris- 
tian faith has come increasingly to control the course 
of mankind is seen in the way in which the former 
of these has come to govern the character of the lat- 
ter. The Perfect World becomes the world in which 
all the inhabitants possess in themselves the image 
of the Perfect Man. All the other features which 
human imagination has attached to the Perfect 
World reflect the external conditions prevailing 
among Christians at various times. But their in- 
fluence is only temporary while his is constant. 

The historical course of the Christian religion 

shows that the advent of such a figure into the natural 

sphere of our life is not to be regarded as merely a 

single isolated act. It is no mere solitary occurrence 

94 



The Making of the Better World 95 

that may never happen again, no mere past event 
that lies in our hearts as a sweet memory as long as 
it can be vividly preserved there but is bound to be- 
come a fading image as the time between him and 
us widens. If it were so, then its gradual disap- 
pearance beyond the range of our vision would tend, 
as soon as we turned our eyes to present conditions, 
to make the present and future of our restless life 
seem all the darker by contrast. That it has not 
done so but on the contrary, has filled human life 
with increasingly higher meaning and richer hope 
is the significant fact. 

The features of the personality of Jesus depicted 
in the Gospels which have been the most powerfully 
effective in human betterment are not those which 
represent him as in the possession of powers ex- 
traneous to the normally conditioned human life 
but those in which he appears as naturally belonging 
both inwardly and outwardly to our race. It is not 
because he could cast out demons and heal diseases 
with a word that he is most attractive to us. There 
is something uncanny in one whose claims rest on 
such a ground as that. If we could do such things 
the ultimate gain for men as compared with what 
we can do in the exercise of our normal powers of 
healing would be very doubtful. Disease would be 
a less serious fact than it is, it would not call forth 
our sympathies and sacrifices as it does and life would 
be less deeply moral than it is now. Neither is it 
because he was able, if he so willed, to feed the hun- 



96 Creative Christianity 

gry multitudes with a few cakes that he attracts the 
hopes of mankind toward himself. We cannot do 
that, and it would be unfortunate both for us and 
for the hungry if we could. Both we and they are 
still dependent and are ever to be dependent on care- 
ful forethought and laborious effort, if there is to 
be safety against hunger and starvation. And it is 
well that it is so. Neither, again, is it because when 
the elements of nature were battling against him 
and his disciples and threatening them with death 
he could still the tempest by his voice and bring them 
to safety that we have come to put our trust in him 
and seek his fellowship. Such a display of power 
leaves us strangers to his secret. For we must have 
recourse to the laborious task of learning the art 
of navigation before we can face the storm with con- 
fidence. If tempests could be so easily mastered how 
little we could know of the worth of our inborn 
capacity to conquer nature by diligence! No! the 
Jesus of the Gospels attracts us to his company, not 
because he could free himself and others at will from 
the limitations incident to life in this world of ours 
or set aside the common obligations that bind us 
down under the bonds of labor and pain, but be- 
cause we have discovered in him a sympathetic 
entering into the needs of our common humanity, 
his assumption of the obligation to help men and 
a summons unto his disciples to a sense of responsi- 
bility for their welfare in every respect. If his 
cross awakens us to love and trust, it is not be- 



The Making of the Better World 97 

cause we see that he was armed with an infinite 
knowledge and power that made him secure, if he so 
willed, against the fear or the power of death. That 
would be to put him far from us at the moment of 
our greatest need of fellowship, since we, poor, 
ignorant mortals, cannot help but succumb when 
our bodies are impaled on a gibbet and have no such 
knowledge in advance of what is to happen. But it 
is because his yoke and ours are the same and be- 
cause with him we walk in triumphant fearlessness 
in the presence of death and seemingly awful defeat. 
Not in the freedom from physical and mental limita- 
tions, not in dazzling, impenetrable deeds, not in the 
exercise of incomprehensible powers, not in the 
ability to transcend at will our native human condi- 
tions and call legions of irresistible angels to his 
side do we discover the secret of his power to redeem 
our common life and transfigure it with a heavenly 
glory. Not there — but in the discovery to our spirits 
that he is the true man of us all in his familiarity 
from within with human experience of the deepest 
kind, in his interpretation of its meaning and worth, 
in his exaltation of the features of life that are 
common to us all to dignity and grandeur — in a 
word, in his universal sociableness has he become an 
abiding asset to the life of humanity and discovered 
to us the way to the better world. 

At this point we have reached the matter of 
central interest in our present study. His disciples 
from the first believed they had his secret. He had 



98 Creative Christianity 

taken them into his heart. They had found a new 
fellowship. It was to him personally they were 
drawn from the first. With him they had entered 
into a new order of life. Their sense of his great- 
ness became a sense of their own. His destiny and 
theirs became inseparable. A cleavage between him 
and them and, in consequence, a cleavage among 
themselves became intolerable to their minds. This 
simple and commonplace statement becomes of the 
highest significance. I said in the last lecture that 
the great achievement of Jesus was his creation of 
faith in himself on the part of his disciples. We may 
now say, in expansion of this statement, that his 
great creative deed was to bring into being a com- 
munion of human spirit with human spirit which 
was of the same order as his own personal com- 
munion with God. The members of this communion 
had begotten in them an estimate of one another's 
worth as infinite, so that all else in the universe is 
conceived as tributary to it. Jesus' achievement is 
the creation of a Christian communion. This com- 
munion is of such a quality that as it has perpetuated 
itself through the successive generations of men it 
has been able to make the natural relations of men 
with one another organic to its propagation and de- 
velopment. Through it the present world of men 
has become a better world in the making. This is 
the thesis to which for a few moments I must bespeak 
your patient attention. In order that this may be 
done I must first take a little time to refer to the 



The Making of the Better World 99 

views which men in various lands and different ages 
have entertained respecting the relation between the 
world in which we now live and another world to 
which men go when they die or may have come 
from at birth. 

Students of primitive types of human communi- 
ties tell us that in the remotest ages and among the 
crudest peoples known to us there was a common 
feeling or intuition of being in contact at times or 
even all the time with other existences somewhat like 
themselves but different in that, among other things, 
they were most of the time invisible and could be- 
come visible at will. These tribes, so remote from 
us in time and manner of life were very like us in 
that they were probably as much interested as we in 
the world of "nature" ' so called and as much affected 
by what happened in it. Unlike us, however, they 
had not yet learned to discover in "nature" a causal 
or philosophical unity, but events in the world seemed 
very often detached happenings with no more order 
about them than the irregular doings of these people 
themselves. Unlike us, again, they had not learned 
to unpeople that world of nature but saw in occur- 
rences around them, especially the unexpected occur- 
rences, the activities of living beings whose impulses 
and thoughts were like their own. Not only fear- 
some facts, like the earthquake, the eclipse, the 
tempest, the lightning and the thunder but the daily 
breach of connnuiry in the comrnuh course of things 
or even the common things themselves, like the 



100 Creative Christianity 

whispering of the dry leaves or the murmuring of 
the bushes in the wind, the prattling of the running 
brook or the strange sounds that awake the sleeper 
at night, were the immediate doings of living beings. 
By them "nature" was inhabited or, at least they 
roamed about in it and thereby brought men under 
their influence. To the ancient Hebrew the evening 
breeze might be the rustling of the garments of 
Jehovah as he walked in his garden at the cool of 
the day. The sound of a going in the tops of the 
mulberry trees might be to the waiting and impatient 
warrior a signal that the Jehovah of armies was 
rushing forth to the battle. Or the roaring of the 
waves of the sea and the answering roar of the 
heavens might be the voice of the animate Deep be- 
low calling unto the Deep above. Indeed it was 
possible, so some ancients thought, that everything 
had an anima, a soul, and men felt a kinship, marked 
by mingled hope and fear, with the animals, the 
trees, the flowers and even with things like the winds 
and waters, that we call inanimate. 

The interest they felt in these things was deeper 
than that of the purely objective observer or that 
of the impersonal and disinterested pursuit of science 
to which we flatter ourselves as having attained. 
They felt too deeply affected by outer things for 
that. Th* pleasant sunshine, the cooling breeze and 
the falling rain were the beneficences of kindly dis- 
posed visitants. But tne smiting and killing blows 
of the torrid sun or the lightning, the crushing power 



The Making of the Better World 101 

of the falling rock or tree or the mysterious snatch- 
away of the breath from the body were the deeds 
of malevolent or hateful beings, like angry or hate- 
ful men. The sense of dependence upon these other 
beings for good or evil was ever upon the minds 
of these early peoples and the thing they desired 
above all was some way of controlling them for 
their own personal interest. Here is where science, 
the daughter of magic, began its wonderful career, 
and here, perhaps, religion also began. Both hold 
that within or behind or beyond the visible there is 
an invisible. In both there is a reaching out to a 
world or sphere of being akin to our own and yet 
far other than ours. How to escape from the ill 
that comes to us from that world or to avail one's 
self of its good, is the problem common to both. 

The interest in the other region was sustained and 
heightened by the constant occurrence of death. 
Increasing population and growing knowledge added 
to the impressiveness of that event. It was always 
painful to think upon, always bore the appearance 
of tragedy. For the tenderness of affection was 
vounded by it, the forward look was contradicted 
by it and it seemed to speak of malignancv. Men 
had seen the cruel blow of anger take away the 
breath. Might it not be that every death was due 
to a similar cause? Death, not life, was the mystery. 
Whither went the spirit when it left the body? 
Sleep and death were much alike. In a dream or 
trance or vision a departed one might be seen for a 



102 Creative Christianity 

time, only to disappear again and at last never again 
to reappear. At such times strange figures also 
appeared, some of them beautiful and kindly and 
some of them hateful and fearful to look upon. Per- 
chance at such times it was our breath or spirit that 
wandered away to that other realm, to return again 
at the moment of awaking? 

If the dead all went to that world, were they worse 
off than the living? It must often have seemed so. 
Else why this shrinking from death on the part of 
all? Might not their taking away be the deed of 
some such being as we see in our dreams when the 
spirit goes a-wandering out into that other world? 
Whatever be the answer, at any rate, the power of 
the other world over the present must be very great. 
Safety and peace must lie in the cultivation of the 
favor of those who dwell there and in the discovery 
of their purposes, if that may be. Many were the 
artifices to gain the needed knowledge. Something 
seemed to be learned from the irruptions of those 
beings of another world into ours. The practices of 
necromancers and soothsayers who contrived to get 
into touch with the invisible, the speculations of 
thinkers who strove to build a theory of that world 
by means of the symbols of it which they thought 
they found in this world, and the ancient mythol- 
ogies, which reflect the picturesqueness of the inter- 
pretations of existence made of old, are all registers 
of the irrepressible craving in the bosoms of men 
for a better world, a world in which all the good 



The Making of the Better World 103 

things of the present world could be retained or 
recovered and the evil things escaped. For, whether 
that other world were a better or a worse world 
than this, men always desired the better, be it here 
or there. 

The uncertainty they felt about the other world 
was deep. All seemed to go to it at death but 
whether there was real life awaiting them there or 
only a shadowy existence was doubtful. The general 
feeling favored the latter. We remember the Hebrew 
Sheol and the Greek Hades, so like it. For the 
ordinary man it was 

"A land of darkness and of the shadow of death; 
A land of thick darkness, as darkness itself ; 
A land of the shadow of death without any order, 
And where the light is as darkness." 

And yet, in comparison with a life of pain and 
wretchedness here it might appear to the weary soul 
as in some ways better: 

''There the wicked cease from troubling 
And there the weary are at rest. 
There the prisoners are at ease together; 
They hear not the voice of the taskmaster. 
The small and the great are there; 
And the servant is free from his master." 

There was a common belief that those who had 



104 Creative Christianity 

lived the more worthily here and the mighty leaders 
of the people would enjoy an immortality like the 
gods that came to men from time to time, while 
others would fade gradually out of existence just 
as the memory of them faded gradually from the 
minds of their friends. Even the gods are depicted 
sometimes as longing for a bit of the real life of 
flesh and blood that men enjoy here. So that we 
must conclude that the world awaiting men after 
death was for the generality of mankind an uninvit- 
ing prospect. The hope of a better world was very 
dim indeed. Brahmanic philosophy predicated an 
almost infinite series of rebirths awaiting the great 
masses of men before they could enter upon the 
higher life that lay beyond and reach the goal of 
final absorption into the Infinite and Final Principle 
of all being. The impersonal principle, Karma, 
which brought men into a lower or a higher human, 
or a sub-human or super-human existence after 
the present would operate perfectly, but who could 
tell what it might have in store for himself? So 
forbidding was the prospect that the reforming 
Buddhist philosophy took a wholly pessimistic view 
of personal existence in any realm and permitted, as 
the sole hope, the attainment of the goal of final 
extinction — Nirvana. The Graeco-Romans and 
other peoples over whom they ruled were more hope- 
ful in that they conceived the possibility of mortal 
men participating in the incorruptness of deity, with- 
out the loss of personality, and sharing at last the 



The Making of the Better World 105 

immortality of the gods. But this was rather for 
the elect few, especially those who had been initiated 
by secret ceremonies into the hidden life. For the 
multitudes the future was dark, and one might almost 
say that, with here and there an exception, the an- 
cient world of men raised one sustained cry of pro- 
test against death. The language of the Hebrew 
Psalmist is native to humanity at large: 

"My soul is full of troubles, 
And my life draweth nigh unto Sheol. 
I am reckoned with those who go down into the 

pit, 
I am as a dead man that hath no help. 
Cast off among the dead, 
Like the slain that lie in the grave, 
Whom thou rememberest no more, 
And they are cut off from thy hand." 

On the part of the Christian, compared with the 
non-Christian, as we learn from the utterance of 
Christian piety preserved in our great stores of 
Christian literature, the interest in the other world 
is more vivid. Without going at length into the 
causes which have brought this about, we can say 
in a word that it is owing to the manner in which 
the whole of one's life is brought under the sway 
of the moral principle — that is, life is viewed as 
constituted by the mutual relations of persons — and 
is filled with the power of moral passion. To 



106 Creative Christianity 

the Christian the evil world is the world that is made 
up of the morally bad persons and the better world 
is the world of the morally better people. That is, 
the world in which those passions and deeds which 
blast personal relations and destroy the sense of 
blessedness gives way to a world in which the pas- 
sions and deeds of mutual love and kindness and 
purity fit men to live together without strife. The 
issue between the bad and the good is more vividly 
conceived by the Christian than by others and the 
division between the two worlds in respect to char- 
acter is more insisted upon. Consequently, death 
ceases to be the dividing line. The cleavage is 
continued clearly beyond death, and both the evil and 
the good of the future world are portrayed in colors 
brilliant and startling. One has but to read the 
meditations, prayers and exhortations of the Chris- 
tian centuries to see that the heaven and the hell of 
the Christian faith have a deeper significance for the 
Christian than the contrasted conditions in a world 
after death had for the non-Christian. Christian 
Creeds and Confessions of Faith, Christian sermons 
and hymnody furnish abundant evidence that the 
longing for the better world and the fear and shrink- 
ing from the worse are permanent and fundamental 
characteristics of the Christian outlook on life. 

In all the efforts of the human imagination to de- 
pict conditions in a world that comes after this one 
may discern a reflection of an inherent dissatisfac- 
tion with things as they now are and a restlessness 



The Making of the Better World 107 

of spirit until that which is better is found. The 
strivings and conflicts which men depict as occurring 
in the material world and which fill so large a place 
in their imagination of a coming world proceed from 
the dividedness and conflict within their own nature. 
So deep and distressing is the turbulency of our 
spirits that we carry it out into the things that sur- 
round us and forward into a world which, so far 
as we are concerned, is yet to be. This diremption 
within so profoundly impressed the thoughtful in the 
past that they sought its explanation in the advent 
into the sphere of our human life of a being utterly 
bad who succeeded in permeating our nature with 
the alien spirit of his own. With the Christian life 
becomes a battle. The agonies of a Paul or an 
Augustine, as they struggled with this inner divided- 
ness, and the terrible denunciations of a Calvin or 
an Edwards, as they sought to rescue men from the 
slavery of sin, disclose more fully than any words 
of mine could do the awfulness of the issue before 
him who would make the better world his own. 
For this inner cleavage runs throughout the history 
of the human family. It has begotten a separation 
between man and man till the whole race has ap- 
peared to men like Augustine as divided into two 
great warring communities, the community of the 
evil and the community of the good, the kingdom of 
Satan and the Kingdom of God. The problem for 
the individual has been, how to make the transition 
from the one to the other, and the problem for 



108 Creative Christianity 

the community has been, how to overcome the one 
and make the other supreme. Here, it seems to me, 
lies the source not only of the inward strivings and 
conflicts of the man but also of the great wars be- 
tween communities. 

We are no longer content to be told that this strug- 
gle has been brought upon us by a sudden fall of our 
humanity from a blessed state in the golden age of 
the past and that the virus has been communicated 
from father to son and from age to age down to 
the present. Even supposing we had, as we have 
not, a history of the struggle from the beginning, we 
should still be in need of an explanation how there 
ever came to be a struggle after the fall. It is not 
sufficient, either, to say that the evil in confix 
the good is a survival of the animality to which 
man is heir. There is neither moral good nor moral 
evil in mere animality. In the animal you find only 
appetite, a dumb craving for physical satisfaction, 
whereas you find in the man a restlessness arising 
from an awareness of personal defect and often of 
demerit. Whether this be felt by reason ©f inward 
condition or by reason of outer circumstances, the 
sense of strife is there. In the Christian it takes 
the form clearly of a sense of disharmony between 
that which he now finds himself to be and that which 
he would be and it issues in an effort to rid himself 
of the one and gain the other. Without going into 
the matter at length, we can say that the human 
characteristic that stands out clearly here is the 



The Making of the Better World 109 

power of idealising one's self, of discovering, so to 
say, one's destiny. The human spirit is possessed 
of prophetic power, the power to bring the future 
forward into the present, the power to "reach a 
hand through time and catch the far-off interest of 
tears." Therein is found an imperative that cannot 
be silenced. That better man which we are to be 
commands us to master the worse man in us. And 
in this, the Christian's longing for the better, there 
is revealed the heart of the world. 

It can scarcely escape the attention of any one who 
is acquainted with the doctrine of human nature 
that is traditional in the circles of Protestant and 
Catholic orthodoxy that the foregoing statement 
runs counter to it. According to the traditionally 
orthodox view, the whole of mankind is turned into 
a "massa perditionis" through the propagation by 
natural generation of the evil nature — Original Sin — 
which supervened in man upon the first transgres- 
sion. There is no need to discuss that doctrine here, 
but it is well to point out that, while it points rightly 
to the community character of human sin, it sadly 
perverts the truth in that it fails to perceive that 
the unity of the human race is constituted, not by 
the fact of a common physical descent, but rather by 
the participation, though in ever so various degrees, 
in a common ideal. The only way we have of know- 
ing that there is such a thing as sin is by the human 
consciousness of an ideal the failure to attain to 
which constitutes the sin. He who awakens in men 



110 Creative Christianity 

the consciousness of the ideal awakens in them the 
consciousness of their sin. But this communion in 
sin would be meaningless and unreal were it not that 
it stands in contrast to the higher communion in the 
ideal. For the ideal is one and not many. So that 
the longing for personal betterment carries with it 
the longing for the universal betterment. Personal 
betterment is discoverable only in the better world. 
Consequently the sense of sin is persistent in the 
Christian heart because the hope of the better world 
is dominant in the Christian. For the Christian the 
world to come, whether it be here or elsewhere, is 
the better world. 

The Christian vision of the future has had tradi- 
tionally a two-fold character corresponding to the 
two sources from which its forms of representation 
have been historically derived. On the one hand 
are the representations that have been derived from 
the apocalypticism of the Jews and, on the other 
hand, are the representations derived from the meta- 
physical speculations of the Greeks. Christian hope 
and expectation have oscillated between these two 
poles. From the Jew came the image of a new 
world of men in a better earth. It would be ushered 
in by a cataclysm, a physical resurrection of the dead, 
a judgment of all mankind before the divine tribunal, 
the sentence of the wicked to the lower world of 
demons and the exaltation of the righteous to the 
happiness of a renovated earth. Here the better 
world is the reward of righteousness and it is be- 



The Making of the Better World 111 

stowed on men from without by the fiat and irre- 
sistible power of God. It is not necessary that I 
should dwell upon the manner in which the Jewish 
concepts and pictures have persisted among Chris- 
tians or that I should specify the variations that have 
appeared. The Catholic catastrophic view of death, 
the temporary purgatorial regions, the final judgment 
day, when the irreversible sentence is pronounced, 
and the eternal heaven and hell portray the better 
world as absolutely distinct and for ever separated 
from the evil world. In Protestantism death is even 
more catastrophically viewed, since purgatory is re- 
pudiated and the eternal destiny of all is irrevocably 
fixed at that moment. But while the picture of a 
final Judgment Day is retained, it loses its signifi- 
cance, inasmuch as the justification of the righteous 
and the condemnation of the wicked are both abso- 
lute and complete in the present life. 

You will please notice that in all this the better 
world is not only a future world for men, but it is 
also a yonder world. Moreover, it is not only a 
world in which men will find themselves some day, 
if they are fitted for it, but it is really existent now 
in all its perfect goodness and perfect blessedness. 
Apart from that world the present world of men 
and their habitation are evil. Deliverance ultimately 
consists in making a safe transition to it from the 
present world. The Christian institutions are viewed 
as constituted for this end. So far as the present 
world is good, its goodness is reflected back upon it 



1 1 2 Creative Ch ristia n ity 

from that other world. For that reason the Chris- 
tian, as Christian, is not at home in the present 
world. "I'm but a stranger here, Heaven is my 
home." The virtues and graces he cultivates here 
set him in contrast to the natural ways of men. He 
must renounce the present world. Unworldliness is 
his constant and outstanding characteristic. He can 
endure the trials and disappointments and sorrows 
of the present world, since they fit him for the better 
world to come. For that world he longs unceas- 
ingly. 

There can be no denying the claim that vast bene- 
fits have accrued to human life through this view 
of the future. The very vision of a world to come 
where perfect goodness and perfect blessedness co- 
exist and endure for ever has served to support the 
effort to maintain the conviction of the rightful 
supremacy of goodness in the present world and to 
vindicate those who have labored and suffered for it. 
It has come as a cheering inspiration to those who 
seek to raise men to such a state here that after death 
they may fitly enter there. Their labor is not vain 
in the Lord. It has filled the hearts of the dis- 
appointed, bereaved, defeated and dying with solace 
and patient courage. And, by contrast, the horrid 
nightmare of the pit of hell has restrained the hand 
of the reckless, sobered the morally indifferent to 
deep concern and helped men to realize the loath- 
someness of the sin that culminates in such a fate. 
But, on the other hand, all this seems to come by 



The Making of the Better World 113 

way of inference rather than from an immediate 
interest in the present world or a direct estimate of 
good and evil here. The cultivation of the virtues 
that are pronounced worthy of reward tends to 
become infected with the spirit of the hireling. 
The door is always open to a disparagement, by con- 
trast, of the common things and tasks of the present 
life and the negative merits of renunciation tend to 
displace the value of a positive consecration of all 
one's powers to the natural callings of life. Other- 
worldliness may become as serious a menace to true 
goodness as "worldliness." 

The Christian inheritance from the Greek, in this 
field, stands in contrast to the inheritance from the 
Jew, but as respects our theme the outcome of the 
two is strikingly similar. The Greek thinkers who 
placed the stamp of their thought upon the ancient 
Catholic church were philosophers and metaphysi- 
cians. They conceived the meaning of the present 
life of man from the point of view of his cosmic 
relations and cosmic destiny. For them the contrast 
between good and evil was founded on the contrast 
between matter, or flesh, and spirit. The mingling 
of these in our world, the pressure of materiality on 
our spirits was the source of all our ills. When the 
seeming is confused with the real, the false with 
the true, darkness, error, corruption and death ensue. 
The hope of the Greek was turned to the higher 
world of spirit. To him that was the better world. 
It was the divine world, for Deity was spirit and 



114 Creative Christianity 

they who sought him must seek him in the spirit 
and the truth. The way of escape from this present 
world of darkness and error was by withdrawal of 
our minds from the material. Then shall we find 
the true light of the world and enter into it. That 
would be immortality. 

The Graeco-Oriental understood the Christian Gos- 
pel in terms of this philosophy. Out of the failure 
to attain to that higher world he came through the 
Gospel to be able to grasp the assurance that it was 
now available for him. For him Jesus was a being 
whose true abode was in that higher world. In his 
life of humiliation on earth divinity had united itself 
to humanity and thereby imparted to it the higher 
potency of the life divine. In him, therefore, human 
nature had become really deified and now by union 
of their nature with his it was possible for men to 
rise out of this lower realm of the material, with 
its darkness, corruption and death, to the higher 
abode of perfect spirit, with its light and incorruption 
and immortality and to dwell there in blessedness 
for ever. To them the Incarnation of God in Christ 
became the central dogma of the Christian faith and 
the hope of the deification of our personal nature its 
governing motive. The kingdom of God was no 
longer the dream only of national or moral idealists 
or the dimly visualized image in the eye of specula- 
tive philosophy. It had become very real. Then 
it became legitimate to take the visions and dreams 
of seers to be actual perceptions of supernatural 



The Making of the Better World 115 

fact. The popular belief in the coming of minister- 
ing angels from that world to ours became estab- 
lished as true to fact. The kingdom of heaven now 
became the kingdom in heaven. There and there alone 
was the better world. That home of the spirits of just 
men made perfect was the "dear, dear country'' for 
which the longing spirits of the saints aspired. 

When once the soul had gained a glimpse of that 
world of light and life the present world became 
unreal, dark, false, evil and truly irredeemable. The 
pathway of holiness was to be found in flight from 
its contaminating power. Renunciation of the world 
became the supreme demand, asceticism the true 
ideal. Contempt for the body, condemnation of the 
natural appetites, extinction of physical passion, self- 
abnegation were required of all who would begin 
even here to attain to the better life and live it for 
ever in that better world. 

But in all this we have only the negative condi- 
of the attainment of the better life. What do all 
these avail if there come down to this world no 
positive heavenly endowments that make available 
to men already a participation in that better world? 
The response to this cry of need was found in the 
(Greek) mysteries, (Latin) sacraments, which are 
the special vehicles, indispensable media of the com- 
munication of the heavenly life to men. Christ was 
gone to the world above and with him was borne 
his deified, glorified human nature but from him 
had come to men by special provision the fruits of 



116 Creative Christianity 

his incarnation. That is, certain selected portions 
of common earthly matter were endowed with the 
higher, divine energy or grace, in order that man 
might participate in the invisible and eternal reali- 
ties in visible and tangible form. Thus, while pro- 
fane things remained profane and common things 
common, portions of the common and profane were 
transfused by special divine operation into a higher 
nature and thereby the way was opened for men to 
a transformation, through this same sacramental 
grace, into the nature of the heavenly. The present 
world still remained evil, I say, but by means of this 
exceptional action of the heavenly upon the earthly 
certain portions are made organic or instrumental to 
the transfusion of our human nature by the heavenly 
and divine. But this is to say that the present 
world in itself is doomed to remain evil and the 
only hope of humanity is to escape from it by 
translation to the better world above. 

But to say that this represents the entire Roman 
Catholic estimate of the relation of the two worlds 
would be very misleading. In her actual practice 
a very different view comes to light. The Roman 
Church, in order to secure her own self-preservation, 
was compelled by force of circumstances to take a 
positive part in governing the present world. The 
remarkable feature about it was that the monasticis- 
ing of the clergy, that is, the enforcement upon them 
of the ideal of world-flight, and the assumption 
of governing power in the world by the clergy went 



\ 
The Making of the Better World 117 

on hand in hand. Each was necessitated by the 
other. It is true that the appearance of exercising 
the power of secular government and of participat- 
ing in the common affairs of this world was seem- 
ingly avoided by compelling the secular authorities 
to do the work directly. But the sword of the church 
was ever suspended over the sword of the state 
threatening destruction to the disobedient. It is evi- 
dent that, in this round-about manner, secular or 
present-worldly things obtained a holy or heavenly 
character by a kind of reflection from the higher 
character of that to which they were subordinated. 
All this was supposed to be in the interest of the 
church's aim to bring men to the better world above. 
Heaven-sent blessings or heaven-sent curses were 
the consequences of obedience and disobedience. 
There was no acknowledgment of the purpose to 
make this present word better for its own sake or 
that it had any value apart from its use as placing 
in the hands of the church the means of drawing 
the hearts of men away to the other world. The 
same is true of the moral requirements which were 
made a pre-requisite to participation in the sacra- 
ments. The sacraments were the heavenly saving 
gifts, they alone were actually effective and the 
moral demands, in so far as they were laid down, 
were the conditions of their efficacious ministration. 
At the same time, we perceive in all this the actual 
working of the Christian faith as a redemptive power 
resident in the common life of humanity and trans- 



118 Creative Christianity 

forming its character inasmuch as the whole complex 
of human activities, from the common personal rela- 
tions of man with man up to the working of great 
economic and political organizations, were then 
brought under the influence of the moral quality 
of the Christian spirit, notwithstanding its perver- 
sion to priestly interests. The theory of the church- 
men stood in contradiction to the facts of supreme 
importance. It was not the sacramental order but 
the moral transformation of common things that 
exhibited the character of the Christian faith. This 
was more powerfully displayed in the course of the 
Protestant Reformation. It is quite true, of course, 
that orthodox Protestantism often exhibited a kin- 
ship to Catholicism in its derogatory view of the 
present world. To Protestant pietists it was com- 
monly viewed as "a waste, howling wilderness." 
The longing for deliverance from the materiality 
of the present existence, for escape from its natural 
ills to the blissful ease of a heaven of rest, the 
accentuation of the necessity of supernatural bestow- 
ments in order to overcome the natural evil into 
which by natural generation we were born — all these 
recur in Protestantism. So also was the dependence 
on the threat of eternal torments in a future world 
as a preventive of sin in the present world. Both 
the Catholics and the Protestants interpreted the 
meaning of the present life in terms of the destiny 
awaiting men in the life to come. After all, the 
holy life was there, not here. 



The Making of the Better World 119 

Yet, by comparison with Catholicism, Protestant- 
ism was distinctly secular. Its repudiation of priest- 
ism and its gradual rejection of sacraments; its 
regard for natural institutions like marriage, the 
family, and the civil state; its tendency to repose 
all the right and power of law on the will of the 
common people; its exaltation of the native intelli- 
gence of men and confidence in the validity of its 
processes; its interest in the achievements of natural 
science; its nurture of economic interests — all these 
things indicate that Protestantism is, on the whole, 
a layman's faith. If Protestantism is more truly 
Christian than Catholicism, then the Christian way 
of attaining to the better world must be different 
from the representation of it in either orthodox 
Catholicism or orthodox Protestantism. It is sug- 
gested that the traditional division between the nat- 
ural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, 
between the realm where God lives and works and 
the realm in which we common men are placed can 
be no longer accepted. The interest in "the other 
world" and the interest in this present world become 
one and the same. Consequently, the betterment of 
the present world, if it is to take place, must be for 
its own sake and not merely for the sake of another 
world to which we are destined to go but which 
is governed by different laws from ours. Moreover, 
the means to be used for its betterment are not to 
be brought into action by a violent irruption into the 
normal course of nature but in the very manner in 



120 Creative Christianity 

which the good of the natural life itself is promoted. 
Quite in keeping with this is the conception of divine 
revelation which is now becoming prevalent among 
the more enlightened. Revelation is ceasing to be 
conceived of as the communication of facts which 
could not be known through the native processes of 
our spirits but only through purely miraculous chan- 
nels, and the Bible is ceasing to be received as an 
authoritative collection of information concerning 
supernatural and superrational facts. 

Consequently, the attempts to bring the lives of 
men in this world under control by appealing to the 
definitely known results in the after-life have lost 
their force in a large measure and in the more in- 
telligent circles this kind of appeal is seldom resorted 
to. The effort to make men better in the present 
world by reference to their selfish interest in escaping 
from pain and gaining pleasure in another world 
is out of keeping with the unselfish Christian spirit 
and we may well doubt that, notwithstanding the 
common use made of it in the past, the power of 
betterment resident in the Christian faith is to be 
found in quite a different source and works in a 
different way. I trust that we are now at length 
ready to discuss it. 

There can be no reasonable doubt that the immense 
sweep of the early Christian Gospel was owing to 
the rebirth of hope in a higher destiny and to the 
creation of a sense of higher worth in the breasts of 
multitudes of the lower classes. Jesus was a car- 



The Making of the Better World 121 

penter and the son of a carpenter. The heavenly 
proclamation came first to such people as shaggy, for- 
gotten shepherds. The first followers of the teacher 
were of the class of fisherman. The common peo- 
ple are said to have heard him gladly. Religious and 
moral outcasts, according to established standards, 
drew near to him. The explanation is offered, that 
he sought after them as a shepherd seeks his lost 
sheep and that he ate and drank with them. That 
is, the narratives represent him as finding the com- 
mon people, both bad and good among them, attrac- 
tive. Their common wants and woes, their loves 
and longings won his heart. He found them inter- 
esting. He believed in them and sought to be near 
them. To be sure, to us this reflects at first sight 
his worth rather than theirs. But it would not be 
a mark of worthfulness in him unless his estimate 
were true. He evidently saw in them in possibility 
the same worth of which he was conscious in himself. 
He was able to transmit to his followers the same 
estimate of mankind. The vision of Christ to their 
souls has become a vision of the future destiny of 
mankind. For he appears as man at man's best. 
Christianity is itself an attempt to take men at their 
best and not at their worst or even at their second 
best. Perhaps we might bring out our meaning by 
saying that Christianity takes men not as they are 
but as they are to be. It idealizes humanity. Every 
human being becomes thereby wonderfully attractive. 
The secret of this attractiveness lies in the latent 



122 Creative Christianity 

consciousness that each of them is essential to our 
true selfhood. We cannot do without these sons of 
men. The thought of an eternal separation from 
them becomes overwhelmingly abhorrent. He who 
does not feel this is false to himself. For the long- 
ing to partake of the best another can bring to 
me is only the reverse side of the desire to com- 
municate my best self to him. He cannot find him- 
self until I give myself to him and I cannot find 
myself until he gives himself to me. We are 
mutually indispensable. This is the discovery we 
make in the love of Christ. 

In this manner there arises in the Christian heart 
a longing for fellowship with each and every man 
in all the world and a vision of the day when man- 
kind will be a unit in that fellowship. In other 
words, the world of men is by anticipation viewed 
as such a world that the Christian communion can 
become universal, all embracing. There is nothing 
in the lives of men which necessarily makes the vis- 
ion spoken of impossible of realization, all appear- 
ances to the contrary notwithstanding. So says the 
spirit of Christian faith. This seems at superficial 
sight, of course, untrue to the facts. But, again, the 
Christian faith persists in seeing men not as they su- 
perficially are but as they are to be. Consequently it 
sees in the weakest and worst those hidden potential- 
ities for the better which a higher fellowship, created 
by the self -giving of the members of the Christian 
community to those who are not yet members of 



The Making of the Better World 123 

that community, will bring to fruition, so that men 
may come to their true selves. That is to say, the 
meaning of the present world of men comes to 
light in the Christian communion. 

It is plain, then, that the better world which is 
in the making by the Christian faith is to be viewed 
as consisting not merely of a part of the human 
family. It does not permit a permanent diremption 
in our universal human consciousness but views it 
as an antithesis to be overcome. The "saved" can- 
not do without the "unsaved.'' Not by a fear of 
contamination through contact with the world of 
men and a cowardly flight from the foe but by a 
fearless and loving association with men everywhere, 
as they pursue their secular tasks, are the disciples 
of Jesus Christ to find their haven of safety and their 
heaven of rest. 

Consider for a moment the character of the Chris- 
tian communion as it appears in a local community 
that we call a church. The significant thing about 
such a local union is that it is made possible by the 
hearty recognition, on the part of each, of a partici- 
pation in the divine love by the others. The power 
that has brought them individually into the fellow- 
ship of the love of God as it is seen in Christ binds 
them together in mutual regard and goodwill. Each 
is elevated in the esteem of the others by recognizing 
his own worth in the worth of the others. The many 
contingencies of life through which all must pass 
make test of the strength of this bond of union and 



124 Creative Christianity 

in this manner there arise in them all the virtues and 
graces of kindness, sympathy, forbearance, forgive- 
ness and such like, without which the aim to estab- 
lish and sustain the communion must remain unful- 
filled. Mark you, it is not by seeking seclusion that 
these graces and virtues arise in all but, on the con- 
trary, it is only in the common secular things of 
life they are summoned forth. Here is the better 
world already in the making. 

Moreover, the high Christian estimate of all men 
leads on to the practical purpose of extending this 
communion throughout the world until it become 
universal. Here arises the imperative to wage war 
with those forces that would impede the execution 
of this purpose and that threaten the communion 
with destruction. The purpose to make this com- 
munion absolutely supreme becomes a basis of com- 
mon action. In this manner there arises a definite 
community based upon that mutual recognition 
of the fellowship that constitutes the communion. 
Contact with other institutions that are not based 
on the clear recognition of the worth of the principle 
constitutive of this communion begets the conflicts 
and struggles which form so large an element in 
the history of human progress. It is in connection 
with these conditions that there are developed the 
virtues of foresight, courage, consecration, endeavor, 
self-sacrifice, watchfulness, self-mastery, determina- 
tion, preseverance. Only in the exercise of these 
qualities can there be any solid confidence in the 



The Making of the Better World 125 

ability to conquer the world. Observe, at the same 
time, that these virtues and graces which arise within 
the Christian community as the outcome of its pur- 
pose to extend itself over all the world are just the 
qualities which are in daily requisition in the per- 
formance of the most commonplace tasks of common 
life. 

Observe, in the next place, that the Christian esti- 
mate of the worth of every man carries with it the 
judgment that the world of mankind is such a world 
that the Christian communion is capable of becoming 
ecumenical, all-embracing. This is but another way 
of saying that the natural relations of men to one 
another, according to the very constitution of men, 
are to be viewed as preparing them to become recipi- 
ents of the grace that makes them members of this 
communion. The meaning of the common life of the 
present world of men comes to light in the Christian 
communion. The secular life ceases to be profane 
and unholy. Separation from it, flight from it, so 
far from aiding in the pursuit of the better life, 
separates one from the conditions under which the 
better life can be normally developed. To put the 
same thought in terms more distinctly theological — 
the attitude of God toward the Christian communion 
of love exhibits his attitude toward the entire human 
race. 

The progress of this communion in the world 
and of the communities that spring our of it, in so 
far as they express its character or embody its spirit, 



126 Creative Christianity 

is to be regarded as exhibiting the purpose and 
method of the divine government of the human fam- 
ily. Hence the clue to the meaning of the history 
of humanity, from its earliest beginnings down to 
the present, is to be found in the purpose that is 
being wrought out in the history of the Christian 
communion. This inspiring conception of human his- 
tory was first set forth broadly, as far as my 
knowledge goes, by the great Augustine in his City 
of God. The thesis of that great work is to be 
re-affirmed today again, though without those lim- 
itations and that warp of thought that arose from 
his self-forced subjection to the Catholic Church. 
That is to say : The execution of the divine judg- 
ments throughout the ages, as they progressively 
sever the evil from the good, is to be viewed as 
manifesting the divine mode of preserving the 
Christian community from the power of destruction 
from without and from within and as vindicative 
of the will to make the Christian communion univer- 
sal. This manifestation of divine righteousness is 
the actual progressive realization, in the course of 
history, of the perfect good God has purposed for 
all mankind. His government of the world becomes 
a fulfillment of his holy love as it is seen in the 
Christian communion. 

Let me observe, in the third place, that this 
enables us to draw a helpful inference as respects 
the relation of the natural institutions of men, such 
as the family, the school, the civil state and the 



The Making of the Better World 127 

economic order to the making of the better world. 
If what I have said about the character of the Chris- 
tian communion as throwing light upon the character 
of the forces that are in actual operation toward 
the making of the better world be true, then these 
institutions are to be viewed as operative in the 
same direction. It is, of course, impossible for us 
to show this in detail at the present time and it may 
very well be that it can never be strictly proven, 
but we have, at any rate, a point of view from which 
these may be discovered to have a significance com- 
mon to them all. All those modes of contemplating 
humanity which make human history atomistic and 
chaotic or even disruptive of an original unity of 
the race; or those which discover its secret in a 
control by miraculous interference from without; 
or those again, which postulate a dual purpose and 
a dual method within the life of the race; or, once 
more, those which seek to determine the meaning 
of human history by means of a knowledge of the 
cosmos apart from man, are hereby set aside. The 
diremption of humanity from humanity or of human- 
ity from the universe is cancelled and the whole 
institutional life of men rises up as a progressive 
revelation of the manner in which the individual 
man comes to himself in a perfect communion of 
all with all. 

This, I beg you to notice, is a very different 
thing from saying that the whole life of the Christian 
communion and the whole sum of its saving energy 



128 Creative Christianity 

among men are to be held within the limits of a 
single organization or order. Nor is it even to say 
that it is necessary that there be any permanent 
organization whatsoever of the forces of the Chris- 
tian communion as a separate institution. Far from 
it ! On the contrary, it takes the natural institutions 
of men of which we have spoken and sees, the rather, 
in them the moulds in which this higher spiritual 
force is to find its most effective mode of action. 
These are to become the organs of the higher life 
and they are to have the higher character which the 
church has been in the habit of claiming for itself. 
We do not leave them or seek some foreign kind 
of order with a view to the realization of the hope 
of the better world of which we are speaking. On 
the contrary, these are to become the organs of the 
higher life and they are to possess the higher char- 
acter which the church as an institution has been in 
the habit of claiming for itself exclusively. The 
native sphere of the operation of the Christian 
spirit is in the forms of the community-life native 
to humanity. There we find our better world in 
the making and if we find it not there we find it 
nowhere. For the most truly human — that is the 
most truly Christian, and the higher natural is the 
true supernatural. 

To resume in brief : — The supremacy of Jesus 
Christ among men, the perfection of personality in 
him, lies not in a self-containedness, a self-sufficiency 
on his part apart from the character and worth of 



The Making of the Better World 129 

any or all the individuals constituting the race of man, 
but in his realization of the indispensability of him- 
self to the race and the indispensability of the whole 
race to himself. Men have seen in him, as he fulfils 
himself progressively in the lives of those who have 
caught the significance of his personality, a quality 
and range of life in which they may all be at last 
at home with one another. In this way the natural 
forms of the community-life of men take on prog- 
ressively a Christian character because apart from 
them the spirit of Jesus Christ would be destitute 
of the organs essential to its self-expression and self- 
fulfillment. We can no longer be content to say 
that the better life is or may be here because it is 
yonder but rather that the better life must be yonder 
in the life to come because it is already here. 



CHAPTER IV. 

LECTURE IV. THE POWER OF COSMIC 
INTERPRETATION 

IN the outline of an interpretation of the Christian 
faith which we have been attempting to present 
in these lectures we have reached the point of 
saying that its genius is exhibited in its creation of 
a moral world governed by the personality discovered 
in Jesus Christ and therefore becoming unceasingly 
better. A careful study of the history of mankind 
since he came and especially of those regions in which 
the Christian Gospel has found a home is confirma- 
tory of our conviction. But some of our most 
serious questionings begin at this point. ' 'Granted," 
it will be said, "that what you have said is true, it 
may not carry us very far. Tell us if you please, 
what is to become of this better world in the end. 
For a world in the abstract, such as you have been 
speaking of, does not concern us very deeply, except 
in the matter of abstract thinking. Our world 
is a concrete world, made up of people whose lives 
are very strictly conditioned by the limitations of a 
physical world in which each one of them lives and 
has his being. Their interest in this physical world 
130 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 131 

is very direct because they are dependent on it for 
every good they seek, including even the spiritual. 
Each one of them has to pass out of this world ere 
long, so far as we, with our limited vision, can see. 
What is his destiny? What becomes of him then? 
His participation in this better world of which you 
have been speaking does not lessen but rather deepens 
his concern with what becomes of people after death. 
Has your Christian faith anything more than guesses 
to offer in reply?" 

The question, we all know, is age-long and thou- 
sands of times an answer has been attempted. The 
interest is not always maintained at the same level 
but rises and falls with the kind and degree of pres- 
sure on our spirits in age after age and in different 
peoples. But it will never down. A Christian 
teacher may be rightfully expected to have something 
to say on the subject for the special reason that the 
Christian religion has so often been represented as 
fixing the hearts of men on a world into which they 
pass at death. Christians have been supposed to 
have in their possession a revelation from another 
world giving to men a positive knowledge of that 
life beyond and of the way to reach it blissfully. 
This indeed has often been supposed to consti- 
tute its principal message. It has been held to 
be a religion of the other world. And there are 
times when men feel very keenly that it must be 
such if it is to continue to be the comforter of the 
heavy-laden multitudes of this world. At the present 



132 Creative Christianity 

day, as our hearts turn to those graves in Flanders' 
Field, an agonizing cry goes up for some assurance 
that, if a man die, he shall live again. Is there a 
place in the universe whither our dear ones go when 
they die? It is a cosmic question and its answer 
involves an interpretation of the cosmos. Has our 
Christianity something of a satisfying nature to say 
to those hosts of intelligent people who are quite 
aware today of the magnitude of the task lying before 
him who would offer a religious interpretation of 
the cosmos? 

I am fairly familiar with the doctrines that Chris- 
tian people in the past held concerning the future life 
and have elsewhere offered a study of it. I feel 
that we are far from being able to content ourselves 
with simply repeating the statements our fathers 
made on this subject. A change in our mode of 
approach to the problem has been forced upon us 
of late and that for two reasons. In the first place, 
we have been forced to a change in our views as to 
what is meant by a revelation and of the manner in 
w^hich it is received. Increasing numbers of intelli- 
gent people, particularly those who have lived 
through a college curriculum, have come to feel that 
no man is competent to say that we have positively 
authenticated information about the future life or 
the world beyond. In the second place, the progress 
of modern science, with its seemingly sure tread, 
has tended to produce an unshakeable conviction that 
there is a universe either made or in the making — 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 133 

and for our purposes today it makes little difference, 
so far as I can see, which you say — and that the 
traditional division of existence into two worlds can 
be only temporary. We must assume all the worlds 
to be a cosmos, an ordered unity if we would inter- 
pret anything. Consequently, any interpretation of 
life that makes the universe finally dual is bound to 
pass away. It would seem also that the way of access 
to be cosmos, an ordered unity, if we would inter- 
of access to a true knowledge of the world to come, if 
we may for a moment make reference to this tem- 
porary division, must be one and the same. The 
two reasons assigned for the change become one. 

It may seem, therefore, at first glance, as if the 
methods and assumptions of modern scientific investi- 
gation, with their wide acceptance in the schools 
where our young people are being trained to think, 
had rendered a disservice to religion. That it has 
rendered a service to our intellect is pretty certain. 
Our emotional experiences have probably profited 
also. Even our morals have been preserved from 
a distressing dualism. But when it comes to reli- 
gion, many anxiously ask whether its hopes have not 
been dissipated like a beautiful but illusive mirage. 

It is, of course, quite out of the question for us 
to deal adequately with this great issue in a single 
lecture. A hint or two which, I trust, may be fruit- 
ful in the effort to answer the questions propounded 
is the best that can be offered here. 

We are to remember that this is assuredly a ques- 



134 Creative Christianity 

tion concerning the cosmos. Certain able and famous 
thinkers of our times have sought to separate reli- 
gious questions entirely from metaphysical or cos- 
mical questions, in the supposed interest of religion. 
They have sought to establish a way of arriving at 
religious certainty in the midst of metaphysical 
uncertainty. It seems to me that such certainty must 
be of a very temporary and timid kind. It may easily 
revert into the most chaotic uncertainty if it reposes, 
as it seems to do, on a diremption in man's nature, 
like the diremption men used to make in the uni- 
verse. It is very noteworthy also that the history 
of human religions shows that, from the rudest 
beginnings of them known to us up to the most highly 
cultured of them, the religions of men have been 
associated with an interpretation of the cosmos. 
To me it seems inevitable that they should always be. 
Therefore this easy way which the Ritshlian school 
would fain hold open is not for us to take. 

I should like to put the question not in the form : 
Can the Christian hope of a better world for all 
eternity be still held, notwithstanding the modern 
view of the cosmos? but in the form, whether the 
modern view of the cosmos does not offer an extra- 
ordinary opportunity to Christian teachers to exhibit 
the supreme worth of the Christian hope? Can 
Christian faith put upon the cosmos an interpreta- 
tion that must be the true basis of any real interpre- 
tation whatsoever? Is the Christian faith creative 
of a power of cosmic interpretation? 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 135 

To answer these questions let us turn for a mo- 
ment, if we may, to consider how any interpretation 
whatsoever of the world arises. To do this we 
may make a distinction between the conscious and 
purposed interpretation of the universe which a 
philosopher seeks as his peculiar task and the, al- 
most, unconscious interpretation of it which the 
ordinary man makes constantly. The latter' s in- 
terpretation is only implied in what he says and 
does generally, and it does not come distinctly before 
his mind until some one raises the question. It may 
very well be, then, that the man is doing and saying 
constantly certain things which he could never do 
were there not a latent view of the physical world 
in his mind which only comes to light when he 
tries to give some reason for what he has done. 
Now, the question before us is this : Does the Chris- 
tian man, just because he is a Christian, become pos- 
sessed of a power to find a meaning in the universe 
which it could not have but for the Christian faith? 
May we expect, therefore, that the Christian cosmic 
philosophy will ultimately surpass and subordinate 
all others? 

To make my point clear permit me to refer to a 
homely event that happened some years ago. I was 
digging one day in a mound that stood in front of 
my summer cottage and presently there fell out of 
a heap of mould that my shovel turned over three 
very crude stone implements or weapons. An exam- 
ination of them carried me in imagination back to 



136 Creative Christianity 

ancient and simple times when the modern mechani- 
cal achievements of man were not dreamed of. But 
here was a beginning. Some savage had taken a 
piece of flat hard stone and, by rubbing it against 
another piece or some other hard thing, had smoothed 
the end of one or the side of another so as to form 
a kind of edge that might enable him to cut some- 
thing with it. What had that man really accom- 
plished when he did this? Well, in the first place, 
he had turned himself into an artisan or an artist 
or both. In fact a true artisan is always something 
of an artist and a true artist is always something 
of an artisan. The ancient artisan turned a piece 
of material to a use it could never have served but 
for him. He had found a new use in dead inanimate 
stone. Millions of ages might pass but, unless one 
such as he had intervened, the stone would remain 
as it was and the end which it was made capable of 
serving would never be disclosed. As it is now, 
he also finds himself possessed of a power he never 
had before. With that crude weapon he can now 
skin a beast or hollow out a piece of wood that will 
serve a purpose that has been hitherto beyond it. 
The whole story of economic and industrial advance 
begins here. This is the starting-point of what we 
call civilization. As it progresses, the earth comes 
to produce for human wants a supply it could never 
have offered but for him. And the extent to which 
this may go on is unlimited. 

What, then, has our crude artisan found? For 



The Pozver of Cosmic Interpretation 137 

one thing, he has found that he is able to use a part 
of what we call nature which was not previously 
available for his own ease or comfort. To a part 
of nature, at least, he is for the time superior. He 
is no longer on a level with that which has now 
become his instrument. It is a far cry from this 
modest achievement and discovery to the mastery 
of nature as a whole, but the important point is 
that he has made a beginning of an undertaking 
which will continually advance but has no end in 
sight. He begins to be a kind of magician wresting 
from nature favors which she would never have 
granted of herself but which she seems bound to 
yield on his demand. So far for the new relation 
to the world of nature. But he also stands now on 
a higher plane of life than those other men who 
have never got his secret. They, like the animals 
must still wait on nature's convenience. They have 
no power to make her give forth more than is her 
wont. If there be a shortage they, like the beasts 
that bask and batten in the woods, must struggle 
against the beasts with tooth and claw for their due 
share. He is the superman. He can dispense favors 
to other men. They are now in a relation of de- 
pendence on him. 

The main point I wish to make here is that our 
artisan has inadvertently put a new interpretation 
upon nature. We cannot claim that he has as yet 
thought it out in any degree but in course of time he 
finds out the meaning of his deed. He will hence- 



138 Creative Christianity 

forth think of himself and of the world about him 
differently. He has the power to think in this wa> 
because he has the power to do the deed referred to. 
He finds that it is through him nature gets its new 
meaning. He has stamped the character of his mind 
upon it. He has made it what it was not and could 
not have been without him. His action is inter- 
pretative because it is creative. More and more he 
finds that he cannot place himself in the same cate- 
gory with the things he is using. He has risen to 
a new pre-eminence in relation to the cosmos and 
therewith has gained the power of a new cosmic 
interpretation. 

One thing, therefore, we have discovered in this 
little excursion into the life of the savage, namely, 
that a human interpretation of the cosmos is some- 
thing more than a product of mere intellectuality. 
Men do not succeed in wresting its secret from the 
universe by examining it from without and, by the 
application of self-sufficient rationality, setting free 
its hidden meaning. We must first put into the world 
that which we afterwards extract from it. We get 
from it again our own self transfused through having 
been immersed in its depths. The new world-inter- 
pretation is a new self-interpretation. Or putting 
it conversely — the world becomes a different world 
to us in its meaning, because we have put into it a 
hidden quality of our selfhood which was not there 
for us before we put it there. 

Of course, it may be said that the world is what 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 139 

it is, no matter what we may be or may think it to 
be, and that the interpretations of it that come 
from transferring to it the qualities of our selfhood 
are artificial and arbitrary. But let us not be too sure 
that this is so. For, not only do we find it possible 
for us to carry the qualities of our inner self out 
in action within the world as if it were meant to be 
the organ of our personality but we, in our very 
selfhood, grow up in the world and find the frame- 
work of our being coming to us from it. If, then, 
we place upon the world the meaning we find in our- 
selves, are we doing violence to it ? On the contrary, 
we may be only showing that it comes to its true 
self in us and by us. 

Let us linger a little longer with our primitive man 
who has made a tool for his own use out of a dead, 
unshapen piece of rock. For the suggestion his 
achievement gives us is of crucial importance to 
our argument. The savage has hereby altered the 
direction of his life's activities and discovered a 
new realm of human knowledge. He has begun to 
be an artisan. That is, he has begun to manipulate 
the mechanical forces of nature in his own interest. 
He has entered on the experience of exercising a 
personal control of nature's forces. Hence he begins 
thinking of nature as never before. The intellectual 
process of discovering and organizing her mechanical 
forces has begun. He is a mechanic and he sees the 
world with the eyes of the mechanic. The way has 
been opened to interpret the universe as one vast 



140 Creative Christianity 

mechanism and to trace its origin to the purposes 
of a great Master Mechanic. The new power of 
which the man has discovered himself to be possessed 
carries with it the exercise of a new cosmic inter- 
pretation. 

Our enterprising savage has also begun, or soon 
will begin, to be an artist as well as artisan. He ad- 
mires his work. He finds himself inclined to preserve 
it not merely as an instrument for getting what he 
wants to satisfy his physical needs but simply as 
something that he has made for his pleasure. In 
course of time he does many such things. These 
acts become pleasurable as well as useful, and 
pleasurable even when they do not appear useful. 
The articles he has made fit his feelings. A sentiment 
of beauty arises within him and its force and range 
of application gradually extend. From feeling a 
beauty in what he has made he comes to feel a beauty 
in things which he has not made but which stand 
there before him already made. That is to say, the 
world is, for him, capable of being physically made 
beautiful and then mentally construed as beautiful. 
Thence the way is open to see in the cosmos a work 
of art. The artist has reached an interpretation of 
the universe not open to any one who is no artist. 
By bringing into exercise a hidden power in his own 
nature he has disclosed a new meaning in the cosmos. 
That is, the world has become in possibility for him 
a true cosmos, an all-embracing Beautiful. The 
world maker may well have been an Infinite Archi- 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 141 

tect of Beauty, the perfect Artist. Nobody but the 
true artist understands His work. 

Our savage who has become both artist and artisan 
has also introduced a new sense of relation to other 
men. He is not only able to appropriate to himself 
more of nature than hitherto, but he has also dis- 
covered to other men what they may do. In this way 
he has founded civilization. For he has discovered 
to men a way of communicating with each other not 
open to anything less than man. Unassisted nature 
could never have done what she is doing now but, 
by the intervention of his genius, connections of a 
new and powerful kind are established among men. 
Men cease to be flocks and herds and droves and 
they become a society. Inner bonds of a kind found 
nowhere else are cemented between them. Social 
customs and maxims arise. Morality is born. The 
material instruments by which the members of a 
human society are bound together are turned 
into instruments for the realization of moral pur- 
poses. Thence the way lies open to the task of 
seeing in the whole universe a medium for the 
fulfilment of the moral life. The universe has a 
moral significance. The man has summoned the 
moral in himself into conscious action and has found 
it possible to transfer to the cosmos the moral quality 
he has discovered in himself. The ethical inter- 
pretation of the cosmos is an achievement of the 
human will and not of the intellect solely. 

I hope that these illustrations of my thesis enable 



142 Creative Christianity 

us now to make a step in the direction the title of 
this lecture suggests. That is, I hope to be able to 
show that in the practice of the religious life men 
enter upon the task of interpreting the universe in 
a way that would not be open to them but for the 
exercise of that kind of activity we call religion. I 
mean that the religious man as such can not be con- 
tented with an interpretation of the universe that 
comes to him independently of his personal religious 
life. He cannot simply take over an interpretation 
that has come from another source and adjust his 
religion to it. It is quite misleading to say that the 
world is whatever it is, no matter what one's religion 
may be. For, just as a crude mechanical invention 
sets a man on the track of turning the whole world 
into a mechanism; as the making of a thing that 
pleases apart from any other use it may have sets 
a man on the track of turning the whole world into 
a revelation of beauty; and as also the entrance upon 
a moral relation with other men sets a man on the 
track of making the whole world into a moral sys- 
tem; similarly, the entrance upon a religious exper- 
ience sets him upon the task of giving a religious 
meaning to the universe. 

No man has as yet succeeded in perfecting any 
such achievement as is here suggested. The mechan- 
ical progress of men is very admirable and every 
fresh advance in this direction makes the vista be- 
fore them more inviting, but whether or no the world 
is really a vast mechanism it is too soon for any one 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 143 

to declare as a known fact. We can only say that the 
prospect of making- it out to be so is increasingly 
encouraging. Whether or no the universe is truly 
beautiful as a whole we do not yet know assuredly, 
but the constantly increasing productivity of the 
beauty-making power of humanity is a very strong 
encouragement to him who fain would believe that 
the universe is so constituted that in its wholeness 
it awakens the sentiment of beauty in the human 
soul that conceives it as a whole. Men have hoped 
that the world is morally constituted and they have 
sought to construe its changes as sanctions of the 
moral law. But very often their constructions 
have been very faulty and in all instances the por- 
tion of events that has admitted definitely such a 
construction is very small indeed in comparison with 
that vast portion that seems to ignore moral con- 
siderations and to defy the attempts of the moralist 
to regard the whole as constituting a moral system 
or as supporting such a system. All we can say is, 
that every fresh moral advance drives us on more 
determinedly to essay the attempt and heightens our 
courage as we face the hard wall of forces in the 
world that are seemingly neutral morally. So too, we 
may find that religion only sets us at the task of turn- 
ing the world into a sanctuary of worship and leads 
us daily onward to survey the whole in this light ; but, 
to answer the question whether the whole is fitted 
to awaken and permanently sustain the religious 
capacities of our nature remains as yet an uncom- 



144 Creative Christianity 

pleted task. The question is, what does religion do 
for the interpretation of the cosmos and what par- 
ticularly does Christianity do in this regard? To 
answer this question we must turn our attention 
once more for a moment to the beginnings of human 
spiritual activity or, at least, to what seems its be- 
ginnings, and thence indicate the direction it has 
principally taken in later periods. 

It has already been pointed out that the knowledge 
that has been gained of primitive times makes it 
pretty clear that science and religion had originally 
a common root. Both sprang, on the one hand, from 
the sense of benefit or harm that came to men from 
happenings in the world about them and, on the other 
hand, from the desire to control the working of the 
forces hidden there so as to secure good things and 
avoid the evil. To men of these remote ages the 
world was in a large degree a sort of disintegrated 
and haphazard juxtaposition of things, a reflex of 
their own irregular thinking and unordered lives. 

In the later times, when the higher reaches of the 
human spirit brought a whole of things, as it 
seemed, within the survey of men and they grasped 
it as a unity of some sort, two divergent judgments 
were passed upon it. Men either saw in the dark 
materiality of existence a threatened inhibition of 
their desires to reach out to better things or else 
they perceived in it a power or powers working for 
their good. The world has always had for men some 
kind of religious significance. Thev have either 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 145 

feared or loved it, or they have both feared and 
loved it, but in no case have they been able to feel 
indifferent toward it. In the religions of men their 
estimate of the world is especially manifest. 

In all religions there is implicit, at least, a cosmic 
philosophy. In Buddhism, for example, or in cer- 
tain types of mediaeval Catholic mysticism our 
human connection with material existence consti- 
tuted an obstacle to the fulfilment to the hopes of the 
pious. But this, so far from diverting their attention 
from the cosmos, as a thing of no account or as to be 
shunned because of its repugnance to their aims, 
really drew their attention to it. The world threw it- 
self persistently on their attention as that which by 
its very oppositional character stimulated their desire 
to explain it. "Otherworldliness" always requires 
for its vindication a theory of the present world. On 
the other hand, in Judaism and Protestant Chris- 
tianity, where the world is conceived as having some 
positive relation to one's good, the imperative to 
interpret it is felt even more strongly because the bet- 
ter life would seem to "be reached along its highways. 
The Protestant spirit shrinks not from the attempt 
to discover the ultimate secret of the universe but 
plunges boldly into its most forbidding regions, con- 
fident that the knowledge of the truth of the world is 
open to all and must minister in the end to the good 
of all. Religion, w T e see, has always a cosmic interest, 
not as a matter of supererogation, but as inherent in 
its very life. 



146 Creative Christianity 

Now, it is commonly admitted that religion is full 
of passion, whether it be the deep and quiet contem- 
plativeness that by its steady flow and pressure sub- 
dues all vagrant feeling and thrusts a man forward 
into severe spiritual conflicts which he must fight out 
all alone ; or whether it be at the other extreme where 
the fierceness of its fire breaks out in fanaticism and 
intolerance; or whether, again, it be in the more 
common ground between these extremes. But, in 
any case, all those passions that play so powerful a 
part in our common human relations, such as court- 
ship, marriage, family life, economic endeavor and 
politics, are taken up into the religious experiences 
of the people. In fact, the manner in which a man's 
religion is related to these things gives the best clue 
to its character. But in science we seem, at first 
glance, to see something quite the opposite. Is it 
not granted that the methods of science and its induc- 
tions can be trusted only when all the play of personal 
interest is rigidly excluded from influencing the 
course of investigation and its outcome? It would 
seem that the motives and methods of science, on the 
one hand, and the motives and methods of religion, 
on the other, are so disparate that conflicts between 
them become inevitable. And may not that conflict 
issue in the destruction of the one or the other of 
them? Such a conclusion does not seem to me jus- 
tifiable. It rises from a habit of overlooking the 
self-imposed limitations under which science is work- 
ing- 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 147 

Science has become to us the sciences. Each 
science concerns itself with a detached portion of 
existence and not with the whole of existence as a 
unity. The interpretation of this ultimate unity has 
become the task of philosophy. Every special science 
detaches a certain portion or field of the whole area 
or complex of facts, the others being regarded as 
temporarily negligible, and by a collation and order- 
ing of the materials found within this field, reaches, 
presumably, certain inductions and inferences. This 
temporary detachment of portions of the area of 
knowledge is necessary, if any progress is to be 
made. But every man of science knows quite well 
that the results reached in this manner must be 
checked up in relation to the results obtained by a 
similar detachment of other portions and that the 
whole must ultimately constitute a unity. If con- 
tradiction arises, there is error somewhere. And 
just as he detaches a portion of the material and 
places the remainder for the time, in abstraction, so 
also he brings to play upon this material, not the 
whole of the capacities of his nature — not all its im- 
pulses, passions, intuitions and longings — but only 
those capacities which by detachment from the others 
enable him to take up and execute this special 
task of making a definite induction within a limited 
area. The whole man, so to say, is not engaged in 
that scientific pursuit but only those powers of his 
nature which seem particularly fitted to it. If the 
others were all allowed free play at the time and in 



148 Creative Christianity 

that particular field, confusion and uncertainty 
would result. But the broad-minded man — who is 
always more than man of science — is quite aware 
that all those qualities and powers of his nature 
which were, for a time, set in abstraction must be 
called back again and their united action given full 
play if life is to be lived in its fulness. Ultimate 
truth cannot be attained by the disruption of our 
humanity but only by its unity. Those very passions 
and impulses, those very hopes and longings which 
any particular science seeks temporarily to ignore, 
remain unextinguished and must reassert themselves 
in due time. Indeed, we may very rightly contend 
that in a sort of half-conscious way they were oper- 
ative in the pursuit of the purely scientific knowledge 
and that, but for them, the task would never have 
been undertaken or, having been undertaken, would 
never have come to completion. 

If for a long time this was not clear to the mind 
of the student of science the situation is now rapidly 
changing- For new scientific discoveries are quickly 
put to some practical use and the pressure of prac- 
tical needs is constantly inciting the scientific in- 
vestigator on to new achievements. Even apart from 
this we can affirm that the man of science is constant- 
ly beckoned onward by the vision of communities of 
men sharing the joy of his coming discovery or, even 
at its lowest, the vision of his own more perfect 
state when he will have enlarged the sphere of his 
action so as to have become the denizen of a larger 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 149 

and, from some point of view, better universe. The 
image of the more perfect personality is ever before 
his mind and but for this his zeal would fade and per- 
ish in indifference and sloth. He may have never 
analyzed his motives or taken the pains speculatively 
to construe their meaning, but if he will do so, he 
will find no stopping place short of that supreme 
regard for personality which is the soul of the re- 
ligious life- 

That is to say, the scientific man is also religious 
and his scientific purposes repose on religious mo- 
tives. 

If what I have been saying is true, we have, in 
the final reckoning, no barely theoretical interest in 
the world in which we live. It is only by the tem- 
porary abstraction of the higher interest that the 
purely theoretical interest can ever be given a place. 
It is not open to us to regard any man's final inter- 
pretation of the cosmos as wholly an outcome of a 
careful discovery and collation of purely objective 
facts and a calm, dispassionate and disinterested 
construction of their interrelations. On the contrary, 
his cosmical interpretations will be found to flow 
from and to express the same deep personal longings 
and purposes as he manifests in the vocation he prac- 
tices, the pleasures he pursues and the personal friend- 
ships and hatreds he cherishes. In every instance 
there will stand disclosed his appreciation of the 
universe as the great complex of facts and forces 
in the midst of which he is to seek those achieve- 



150 Creative Christianity 

ments or attain those ends that constitute his life as 
a man. The universe becomes his universe. Be- 
tween its character and his character there is always 
a certain correspondence. His personal attainments 
impart to the universe a character it could never 
have had but for him. Even if one were to say 
that he does not know whether or no there be a 
universe, yet the very attempt he is constantly mak- 
ing to answer the question of its existence discloses 
the motive of his endeavor, namely, the aim of 
achieving an inner unity. For this inner unity is 
impossible of realization apart from the unity of all 
existence, that is, a universe. 

We have now reached the crux of our problem 
in the present lecture : Does Christianity as a re- 
ligious faith bring to its votaries a power of cosmic 
interpretation not to be found otherwise or elsewhere 
and, if so, what is this distinctively Christian insight 
into the meaning of this world which we call a cos- 
mos ? 1 feel that the inevitable brevity of our discus- 
sion makes it possible for us to give only a hint of 
answer to this question and that the answer must 
bear a somewhat dogmatical stamp. The outstanding 
characteristics of the Christian religion as adum- 
brated in our preceding lectures shall be the basis 
of the treatment of the present subject. 

In the discussion of the creative activity of the 
Christian spirit as it is seen at work in the discovery 
of the perfect personality we have seen that this 
perfect personality is visualized progressively as one, 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 151 

by the enlistment and unified direction of his powers, 
comes to the realization of his own selfhood. The 
discovery of that Perfect One is an achievement. 
But at the same time, to speak in the language of 
religion, it is a revelation. In the devotion of our 
energies to the higher end we are aware that w r e are 
the subjects of the power of that higher personality. 
He makes us what we are. We have also seen in our 
study of the making of the better world that the crea- 
tive activity of the Christian spirit is manifested in 
the way of an impartation of one's self to other men 
and that, as we proceed on our way to the fulfillment 
of this task of recreating other men in our likeness, 
there is no limit that can be set for us short of filling 
the whole world with our own higher worth. Yet, 
throughout this whole process of self -giving, the 
Christian is aware that the others are as indispens- 
able to him as he to them. He must have them all 
in communion with himself, he must ever receive 
of them into his inmost self, for without them he 
can never become the man he wills to be. It is this 
illimitable community of men that is to make of him 
the man he is to be. 

At the same time it is to be noted that the commu- 
nity life of men does not arise in independence of 
the forces of the material universe or by the purely 
immediate relation of human persons with one 
another after the mystical order. On the contrary, 
we know of no fellowship of men with one another 
which is not mediated by physical forms. The 



152 Creative Christianity 

character of that fellowship has always a correspond- 
ence with the action of the material environment. 
Thus the communication of the higher life from 
one man to another is to be construed as effectuated 
through the cooperation of the human spirit with 
the action of the material order in which it has its 
habitat. Men are the subjects of the working of 
that order at the same time that they use it as their 
instrument. In the Christian faith this cooperative 
action is comprehended in its unity as an act of God 
himself acting upon our spirits. 

That is to say, in the attempt to set forth 
the creativity of the Christian faith the active and 
the receptive sides of our nature are brought to- 
gether. In the Christian religion they are seen in 
equipoise. On the one side, we have seen that the 
Christian faith summons the active forces of our 
nature to their highest possible development. It 
contains the great "I WILL" of the human spirit. 
Its watchwords are consecration, self-devotion. It 
begets in men unparalleled ambition, determination 
to fulfill one's self to the utmost, intolerance of self- 
effacement. It produces a self-affirmation unquench- 
able. No sooner is one goal attained than there 
appears another goal that needs for its attainment 
a mightier force than ever. Wherever this faith 
may go its productivity is evident in all the spheres 
of life — social, economic, intellectual, moral. The 
Christian is continually discovering in himself pow- 
ers undreamt of before. He seeks no Elysium of 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 153 

ease but a heaven of conquest. He can never be 
content to be only himself but must ever become 
more than himself. 

But in and with this assertiveness of soul — not 
prior or subsequent to it, but coactive with it — there 
is an attitude of perfect receptivity. That ultimate 
to which he aspires arises, it is true, out of the 
creativity of his own spirit but at the same time it 
is that which makes him what he is. That better 
world which is to come into being through his ef- 
fort is by its very forthcoming producing in him that 
betterment which he seeks to impart to mankind. 
And thus, at the very moment when we Christians 
are bringing the whole body of our concentrated 
energies into an action that exhausts their strength 
— at that very moment, I say, we are the most fully 
receptive. The classical expression of it is the 
Pauline: "I labored more abundantly than they 
all, yet not I but the grace of God that was with 
me."' "Work out your own salvation with fear 
and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you.'' 
Thus self-assertion does not become arrogance, nor 
submission become indifference. Initiative does not 
become recklessness nor trust, quiescence. Free ac- 
tion does not become lawlessness nor obedience, self- 
contempt. 

The contrast with Judaism and Buddhism, for 
example, with their separation between that which 
man does and that which is done for him, 
is evident. In Judaism, the "I will'' of God 



154 Creative Christianity 

and the "I will" of man are successive in the 
order of time and contingent on one another, so 
that the tendency is to make of God a commanding 
and irresistible Will to which man must submit in 
utter helplessness. In Buddhism, on the contrary, 
there is an exclusion of any redeeming or uplifting 
power and reliance is placed on the concentrated will 
of the man unsustained by a higher Will. But in 
Christianity the two sides of our nature are perfected 
in their unity. In the fullest affirmation of the 
meaning and worth of our own personality there are 
the blessedness and peace that come from being sub- 
ject to the projection of the higher personality into 
ours. In all this a certain attitude toward the cosmos, 
an implicit interpretation of it, comes to light. We 
must now attempt to indicate by way of suggestion 
what this may be. 

We have seen that, to us Christians, Jesus appears 
as the Perfect Personality. His title to this high 
honor rests not on his freedom, or exemption, from 
the physical and spiritual conditions under which 
our common lives must be lived but on the quality 
of spirit he manifested and set in circulation among 
men. Outwardly viewed, the circumstances of his 
life were far from ideal. The child of a disap- 
pointed, defeated and subject people; nurtured in 
the midst of social conditions that were dominated 
by the influence of a selfish oligarchy, on the one 
hand, and an intolerant hierarchy, on the other; 
with the sight of the suffering that filth and disease, 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 155 

poverty and hunger always bring to mortal men con- 
tinually before his eyes; himself impeded in his 
work, persecuted, arrested and gibbeted through 
official jealousy and obsequiency and through popular 
madness. The forces of malignity and the powers 
of the cosmos seemed allied against him. In strik- 
ing contrast to all this is the kindly way in which 
he had formerly looked upon that which we call 
"nature." To him the natural had not been synony- 
mous with the hard and evil and unfeeling but was 
instinct with the beauty and goodness that filled his 
own soul. Perchance some one may feel inclined 
to say that these qualities could not be found in 
nature itself but that he reflected them upon it from 
his own soul and thus put into nature a meaning that 
was quite contrary to its real character- Be that as 
it may, the contradiction between his love of life and 
the way in which the forces of material nature were 
used against him to crush out his life is evident 
enough on the surface. It is no wonder that the 
evangelist in relating the story of his death said 
that a darkness came over all the earth when he died. 
Yet in the face of all this we can confidently 
affirm that the chief source of Jesus' attractiveness 
lies in his crucifixion and the way he went to it. It 
is the spectacle of the Crucified upon his cross and 
his cry of mingled desolation, forgiveness, confi- 
dence and triumph that has broken the hearts of 
men and subdued them to the power of his grace — 
not the spectacle of his reigning in glory with his 



156 Creative Christianity 

foes beneath his feet. It has seemed to men the 
tragedy of tragedies to witness the reduction of all 
the graces and virtues, the hopes and longings of all 
mankind to shame and spitting and death. Why 
should tragedy possess that mighty attractiveness 
which it undoubtedly has for us all unless it be that 
through nothing less can the true nobility of perfect 
manhood come to light? Jesus' true selfhood came 
to light thereby, and that not to our sight alone 
but to his own most truly. When his disciples, in 
consequence of it, declared that they saw him seated 
afterwards on the right hand of the Majesty on 
High, what was it but their way of affirming that 
the supremacy of his personality came to realization 
by the cross? The forces that combined to accomp- 
lish his seeming overthrow became the ladder set 
up on earth by which men ascend to heaven. 

Therewith is assigned to the believer in Jesus 
the task of reinterpreting the whole cosmos in accord- 
ance with the significance of this achievement of 
the Master. Science, in forcing us to the recog- 
nition of the unity of all worlds compels us to see that 
if any portion of the universe or any event in its 
normal course has a moral or religious meaning it 
is because the whole has such a meaning. It has 
compelled us, so to say, to dismiss isolated miracles 
to make room for one single, all-embracing miracle. 
Christianity says that this miracle must be a miracle 
of good and not of evil. 

The prospect of wresting from the universe a 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 157 

message of goodwill and of the uplifting power of 
goodness seems, it is true, a forbidding one. In the 
words of John Stuart Mill : "Nature impales men, 
breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be 
devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, 
crushes them with stones like the first Christian 
martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with 
cold, poisons them with the quick or slow venom of 
her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous 
deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of 
a Nabi or a Domitian never surpassed. All this 
Nature does with the most supercilious disregard 
both of mercy and of justice." 

This terrible indictment sets forth all too plainly 
the fearsome and shrinking attitude toward nature 
assumed by multitudes in other ages and even in our 
own. The human response to nature's challenge has 
taken many forms, from the dogged stubbornness 
of the Stoic and the assumed contempt for the world 
on the part of the mediaeval mystic to the utter hope- 
lessness of the Buddhist, except that the latter holds 
that, by the extinction of desire, annihilation of 
existence may be attained. Even the Protestant 
Kant felt that the realm of nature and the moral 
realm were not inwardly connected- To him they 
seemed subject to different laws and their mani- 
festations were of a divergent character. He found 
himself obliged to postulate — for he felt he could not 
prove — the existence of God in order to reconcile 
these two worlds. But this still left the natural 



158 Creative Christianity 

world an alien, if not a foe, to our moral nature. 

If now, in contrast to all this, the Christian can 
possess his soul in peace and live his life in fulness 
of joyful strength, since he sees in Nature a friend 
to his higher purposes, it must be because, together 
with his ampler knowledge of the world's forces and 
operations, he unites a quality of inner life of his 
own that enables him to bring to the world-problem 
a power of interpretation unknown to others. 

His interpretation of the cosmos comes to him as 
the only satisfactory explanation of his own achieve- 
ment- He has faced the terrible foes lurking in 
Nature, "red in tooth and claw," and found them in 
the end to be his friends. The seemingly pitiless 
powers that have afflicted him with pains and sick- 
ness, penalties and losses, bereavements and sorrows, 
and even the certainty of the arrival of swift-ap- 
proaching death to himself and to all that he holds 
dear have disclosed their kindlier side to him. Even 
when his whole career in life seems to have marked 
him out to be an innocent sufferer for others' mis- 
doings or to be suffering, it would seem, meaning- 
lessly at the hands of a Universe that pays not the 
slightest regard to his longing for relief, he finds 
in the end that his very misfortunes have turned out 
to be the indispensable means to the better life that 
has come to him. He has been able to turn the 
miseries and terrors with which Nature has 
visited men into smiling friends. lie glories 
in tribulation, for tribulation works patience, and 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 159 

patience probation, and probation hope, and hope 
makes not ashamed because in the midst of these 
things the love of God has been shed abroad in his 
heart through Christ Jesus. He knows no other way 
by which this love could come to his heart, than by 
the road of trial. To be sure, he has not gone very 
far in his exploration of Nature's secrets. He has 
surveyed only a very little of the illimitable regions 
of life that lie before men. But, having begun, he 
can find no stopping place. And the discoveries he 
has made in this spiritual enterprise must be the 
basis — just as it is in all science — of all further 
explorations. The world that has been evil to other 
men he is making over into a good world. If the 
cosmos is an ultimate unity he may well believe that 
his task can be accomplished. 

Just as he who creates a mechanical instrument 
out of an unordered mass of dead matter finds him- 
self warranted thereby in turning the whole world 
into a mechanism subservient to a personal pur- 
pose ; and as he who creates a thing of beauty out of 
a mass that is without form or comeliness, until he 
transforms it, finds himself warranted to discover 
the sentiment of beauty in the whole of things; so 
also the man who has discovered that that which 
seemingly had no interest in goodness but was 
possibly malignant and sought his ruin, can be 
turned by him into a ministrant of blessedness, finds 
himself warranted to go forward to the infinite 
task of turning a religionless universe into a mes- 



160 Creative Christianity 

senger of love. He finds the meaning of the cosmos 
disclosed in the conquests he has made. He has 
taken the seeming "dare" of nature and found that 
he can turn it into his true friend. He has made her 
speak the language of the tenderest service to per- 
sonality. To him, the universe exists for the purpose 
of bringing into being just such personalities as he 
finds himself coming to be. He verily makes over 
the universe progressively in his own soul. His 
cosmos is the product of his own creative spirit. 

If at this point we recall how it was pointed out 
in an earlier stage of our study that it is only in the 
communion of personalities any human person comes 
to his true self, our contention will be the more 
abundantly vindicated. For the growing community 
of spirit which is developing on a broad scale among 
the many races of mankind has been rendered pos- 
sible by means of the prodigious advance recently 
made in those scientific discoveries which have placed 
the forces of material existence at the disposal of 
mankind for their well-being. 

Hereby also is brought to light the ultimate motive 
of all science. The great generalizations of science 
turn out to be a method of transferring to objective 
nature the predicates descriptive of our personal na- 
ture. Science is an instrument for the affirmation of 
the supremacy of personality in the universe, for in 
the transfer of the terms which are descriptive of 
the inner movements of our subjectivity to the objec- 
tive world there is nothing artificial, but in the act 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 161 

of clothing nature, seemingly external to our per- 
sonality, in the very garb of personality the truth 
of nature itself is discovered and set forth. Nature 
thus becomes instrumental to the achievements of 
the higher spiritual life. This is the faith upon 
which science reposes. Without it the motive pow- 
er that carries the man of science through his prod- 
igious labors would be lacking. 

If there seems at first glance an arbitrariness at- 
taching to this method of cosmic interpretation it 
disappears when full weight is given to a consid- 
eration mentioned earlier. It was pointed out that 
in the midst of our intensest and most spontaneous 
activity we are the most fully conscious of being 
receptive of the action of another. In human life 
action and passion are reciprocal and equal. In the 
cosmos there is that which impresses itself upon us, 
awakens in us the powers that we should otherwise 
never know to be ours and enacts its achievements 
anew in our souls. In making over the cosmos into 
our human likeness we are ourselves made over into 
the higher likeness which we discover there. 

Here, therefore, lies the way to the answer to be 
given to the question of destiny. The world is 
ours and ever shall be increasingly. "We are more 
than conquerors through him that loved us." "All 
things work together for good to them that love 
God." 

To the Christian the universe cannot be an insol- 
uble mystery. Mystery indeed it is, but not an 



162 Creative Christianity 

insoluble mystery. For mystery stands no longer 
for that which is ultimately unknowable but only 
for that which is not yet known. The attraction 
of the mysterious — and who has not felt its power ? — 
lies not in its inhibition of all further search by 
the erection of an impenetrable barrier to all spir- 
itual progress but in the intimation to the pioneer 
of thought that away "behind the ranges" there lies 
an unexplored region that must yet be traversed 
by him ere his life's task be completed. But, apart 
from the Christian faith, I do not see how the uni- 
verse can ever have a meaning that will satisfy our 
deepest longing. For, though we should succeed, 
independently of this faith, in answering the question 
of the how or even the whence of this complex of 
things we call the world, the question of the « 
imto must remain unanswered unless one can find 
the way to turn its tragedies into triumphs and all 
its evil into good. 

This is the great bestowment of the Crucified. 
He has discovered to us personality finding its per- 
fection ministered unto by the agonies as well as by 
the experiences of bliss that corne to our spirits 
through the inseparability of our destiny from the 
natural constitution of the cosmos. We are making 
our cosmos after our inner likeness while we are 
being made through it. Without the sufferings it 
ministers to us we should lose the better part of its 
meaning, for we should never find our true self in 
it. We should never know what it is for one to rise 



The Power of Cosmic Interpretation 163 

to the highest plane of life by learning how to give his 
life a ransom for many. The Christian is able to 
turn the universe into a cosmos ordered and beauti- 
fied to be the external abode of the personalities 
perfected in vicariousness. He is able to find the 
everlasting in the present and life in the midst of 
death. 

Some months ago when I was a guest of Professor 
Thorp of the United Theological College, Bangalore, 
Mysore, India, I picked up a little volume of med- 
itations by an author whose name I have, unfortun- 
ately, forgotten and from it copied a short poem en- 
titled, 'And the Life Everlasting.' With it our 
series of meditations, is brought to a close. 

"AND THE LIFE EVERLASTING" 

It will not meet us where the shadows fall 
Beside the sea that bounds the Evening Land; 

It will not greet us with its first clear call 

When death has borne us to the farther strand. 

It is not something yet to be revealed — 
The Everlasting Life; 'tis here and now, 

Passing unseen because our eyes are sealed 
With blindness for the pride upon our brow. 

It calls us 'mid the traffic of the street, 

And calls in vain because our ears are lent 

To those poor babblements of praise that cheat 
The soul of heaven's truth with earth's content. 



164 Creative Christianity 

It dwells not in innumerable years; 

It is the breath of God in timeless things — 
The strong, divine persistence that inheres 

In love's red pulses and in faith's white wings. 

It is the power whereby low lives aspire 

Unto the doing of a selfless deed, 
Unto the slaying of a soft desire 

In service of the high, unworldly creed. 

It is the treasure that is ours to hold 
While all things else are turned to dust ; 

That priceless and imperishable gold 
Beyond the scathe of robber or of rust. 

It is the clarion when the sun is high — 
The touch of greatness in the toil for bread — 

The nameless comfort of the winter's sky — 
The healing silence where we lay our dead. 

And if we feel it not among our strife, 
In all our toiling and in all our pain — 

This rhythmic pulsing of immortal life — 
Then do we work and suffer here in vain. 



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